WhyUsability

Most of this page is a taken from a swedish book called Usability in Practice. (Berndtsson & Ottersten, 2002)

Obviously anyone designing a product want that product to be used, otherwise all effort to create the product would be a complete waste.

Sadly, very few projects spends enough resources to ensure the usability of the resulting product. The excuse being that the product will probably be good enough without spending the resources, or worse, that there's no need as the developers are guided by common sense.

By virtue of knowing the internals of the product, and also of the deep studying of the problem domain that developers commit to, they are able to deduce usage sequences that a "normal" user might be incapable of guessing. The mental model of the product and how it works will not match that of future users. More on this in the UsabilityTheories page. Apart from that it's just generally impossible to guess what another persons experiences with the problem and the suggested solution will be.

Another aspect of the problem is that anyone with a stake in the actual implementation will have a bias towards simplicity and/or price. So developers aren't just incapable of guessing the optimal design, they shouldn't even be too deeply involved in the analysis phase at all.

All in all, there is just too much opinions and guesswork involved in the design. (I'm sure you have been involved in a flame war at some time where everyone "knows" what's best for the user... *cough*Gnome*cough*)

Spending resources on usability upfront and throughout the project will save considerable resources for the project and the client(s) at later stages.

Ensuring that the requirements for the project are correctly analyzed at the start of the project will reduce the need for change at later stages. Considering that changes late in the development phase can be up to six times as expensive as in the analysis phase, and changes introduced in the maintenance phase up to a hundred times as expensive (Bias & Mayhew, 1994), this is a Good Thing (TM).

A project that implements a usability focused development model can reduce the development time by 33%-50%. (Bosert, 1991, , Quality Functional Deployment: A Practitioner's Approach. NY: ASQC Quality Press)

WhyUsability (last edited 2008-08-06 16:15:44 by localhost)