I just read a blog post by Fabien Tiburce, CEO of Compliantia entitled Usability and Retail Systems.  He makes some good points:

1. If the system is not easy to use, people won’t use it (at least voluntarily).
2. Developers are not generally usability experts and neither by default are graphic artists.  As Fabien states, “making something attractive visually has very little to do with making it function well.”
3. Prototype and test alternatives.
4. If at all possible, “eat your own dog food.”

Usability is critical in any application.  It’s critical for user acceptance and hence, achieving any benefits expected from the system.  If usability is poor enough, I even seen users go out of their way to attempt to have the application removed.

Fabien also states that he has team members critique each other’s work.  I think this is a good start, but you really need to have someone skilled at usability on the deployment platform(s) to determine how to act on the critique.  Designing for usability requires, to some degree, specialized knowledge of the capabilities and usability standards for the target platform.  Steve Krug’s book, “Don’t Make Me Think,” is a great example of this type of thinking for the web.

I think the best advice Fabien provides is this: “If you want to be humbled, watch your software being used by someone who has never used it before and who has no vested interest in its success. “  I refer to this in a previous blog post.  It’s amazing to me how few software companies do this well.  Any software company that does this one thing well (and acts on the result) will be ahead of the competition.  Great usability can be a sustainable competitive advantage –look at Apple.

Tags: usability

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Software Development, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.