What is usability and why should I care?

In life we are totally surrounded by things designed by humans. Anything from a door handle to the most sophisticated software or website has to be designed. There are good and bad designers which means there are plenty of good and bad designs. Probably more annoyingly, there are also lots of designs that don’t really fit into either the good or bad categories but rather, sit somewhere in the middle!

Usability is the art of good designed so that the end product is easily usable. If you’ve found yourself in a hotel room trying to figure out how to turn the shower on; or pushing the wrong side of a door because it’s not obvious how to open it – you have been a victim of a bad design that has a lack of usability.

As a techie I often find myself looking at things and thinking “that’s stupid” because there are bits that just don’t seem to make sense. Most often it’s simple things that annoy me because they should be easy to fix!

I realise that as a software developer, I’m setting myself up for a fall here. Someone will read this post and then beat me with it over some bit of software that I’ve created but that’s ok – at least it may start a debate.

Of course, not everyone thinks in the same way and so differences of opinion always cause disagreements about how things should work. There are sometimes functionality conflicts which mean that something has to be the way it is because of other elements in the system. Additionally, there will always be budget, resource, legacy code and other constraints that limit what is possible. However, the things I’m going to focus on in coming posts are mainly because too often simple things aren’t good enough.

Designers of anything (especially software) should always be trying their hardest to anticipate the issues users will face and think about what makes sense for someone using the system. This is often hard for a software developer because we use the software constantly during development and so may forget what the system looks like to someone seeing it for the first few times.

This blog post is intended as a primer which I will refer to each time I post a message about a usability issue that I’ve discovered.