It is a great experience to join the tutorial by another guru in Nielsen Norman /group, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini. I chose a seat in the first row, thinking to catch every word I hear. Everybody in the room is excited as we all tried very hard with our boss to get this chance.

I like to listen to the senior speakers. They can tell you real stories. Tog was talking about lots of experiences he had in Apple, in Sun and in WebMD…as well as his flying with his wife.

Tog led us going through the principles, theories and practices about HCI. Interestingly, he showed the MBTI studies of Apple Engineers and US population based on Carl Jung’s Psychological theories.  75% US populations are sensing (receiving data primarily from the five senses) while 75% Apple engineers are intuition (receiving data from the subconscious). That makes sense. I remembered every time I presented to my “perfectly designed” interface to users, watching how they moving their mouse, it is just not what I expected. There are two kinds of people in the world and we are designing the interface for the other kind!

Now Tog is talking about Fitts’ law, which I know but never tried in my design. The formula is just too complicated to be applied. He gave the example of Pie menu, start menu of Windows, file menu of Mac OS. Pie menu is the effective for user to target as it is right around user’s mouse.  It reminded me the product called “Visual Architect”, the resource-centric concept is a good Fitts’ law sample! Now It seems I have some ideas to apply Fitts’ law to my work…