Well, this is nothing new. It's called heuristic evaluation and it's been around at least since 1990 [1]. Almost every item in the article's list maps to a simple and well known heuristic.
It's very strange (or sad) that the author doesn't mention heuristics in his post and talks about his conclusion as something "new": "it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away." It may have "dawned on you", but it's nothing new.
It never ceases to amaze me, how oblivious of basic usability the people in IT are.
[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.
It's very strange (or sad) that the author doesn't mention heuristics in his post and talks about his conclusion as something "new": "it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away." It may have "dawned on you", but it's nothing new.
It never ceases to amaze me, how oblivious of basic usability the people in IT are.
[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.