Humans are difficult by Kristina Chodorow.
From the post:
My web app, Noodlin, has two basic functions: 1) create notes and 2) connect them, so I tried to make it blindingly obvious how to do both in the UI. Unfortunately, when I first started telling people about it, the first feedback I got was, “how do you create a connection?”
The original scheme: you clicked on the dark border to start a connection.
At that point, the way you created a connection was to click on the border of a note (a dark border would appear around a note when the mouse got close). Okay, so that wasn’t obvious enough, even though the tutorial said, “click on my border to create a connection.” I learned a lesson there: no one reads tutorials. However, I didn’t know what users did expect.
I started trying things: I darkened the color of the border, I had little connections pop out of the edge and follow your mouse as you moved it near a note. I heard from one user that she had tried dragging from one note to another, so I made that work, too. But people were still confused.
So what tripped Kristina up? She has authored two books on MongoDB, numerous other contributions, so she really knows her stuff.
In a phrase, design by developer.
All of her solutions were perfectly obvious to her, but as you will read in her post, not to her users.
Not the release of commercial software (you can supply examples of those failures on your own) but illustrates a major reason for semantic diversity:
We all view the world from a different set of default settings.
So we react to interfaces differently. The only way to discover which one will work for others, is to ask.
BTW, strictly my default view but Kristina’s Noodlin is worth a long look!