What is Usability?
Question: What is Usability?
Explaining usability is an argument, or at least a heated debate, waiting to happen. Fortunately all the interested parties have some similarities to their definitions.
Answer:
What is Usability?
Usability is a subset of ergonomics and human factors that focuses on making things usable. Usability can encompass making things usable for a wider population, like making a handle smaller so children and can use it as well as adults.
It also includes making something do more things. Just think of the increased usability of your word processing program over a typewriter.
Most discussions of usability get confusing because there is a lot of jargon thrown around and it takes on a different focus, and sometimes a different meaning, with different groups.
Some of the jargon you might hear includes:
Additionally ergonomists, web designers, print publishers, psychologists, software engineers and just about every other engineering and design discipline claim usability in some way and put their own spin on defining it.
However, none of that really matters. Usability is simply a methodological (i.e. science, engineering, design, etc.) process of improving the use of an item or system. Usability focuses on the interaction between the human and the use and looks for ways to make it better.
How Usability Affects You
Usability, much like ergonomics, is all around you. Manufacturers and designers are constantly performing usability tests on their designs to make sure you’ll buy them, city planners are trying to ease traffic congestion, web designers are improving their site’s web usability and you are watching infomercials to find a way to shave ten minutes off of your dinner preparations.
There is even a global group working to promote usability through World Usability Day. So just try to understand it, accept it and embrace it. Usability makes your life easier. That is unless they get it wrong or you’re in some minority demographic. Just ask a left hander how difficult life can be.
Explaining usability is an argument, or at least a heated debate, waiting to happen. Fortunately all the interested parties have some similarities to their definitions.
Answer:
What is Usability?
Usability is a subset of ergonomics and human factors that focuses on making things usable. Usability can encompass making things usable for a wider population, like making a handle smaller so children and can use it as well as adults.
It also includes making something do more things. Just think of the increased usability of your word processing program over a typewriter.
Most discussions of usability get confusing because there is a lot of jargon thrown around and it takes on a different focus, and sometimes a different meaning, with different groups.
Some of the jargon you might hear includes:
- Contextual Inquiry
- Gestalt Psychology
- Graphic User Interface (GUI)
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Human-Machine Interface
- Knowledge Transfer
- Morphology
- Learnability
- User-Centered Design Paradigm
- User-centric
Additionally ergonomists, web designers, print publishers, psychologists, software engineers and just about every other engineering and design discipline claim usability in some way and put their own spin on defining it.
However, none of that really matters. Usability is simply a methodological (i.e. science, engineering, design, etc.) process of improving the use of an item or system. Usability focuses on the interaction between the human and the use and looks for ways to make it better.
How Usability Affects You
Usability, much like ergonomics, is all around you. Manufacturers and designers are constantly performing usability tests on their designs to make sure you’ll buy them, city planners are trying to ease traffic congestion, web designers are improving their site’s web usability and you are watching infomercials to find a way to shave ten minutes off of your dinner preparations.
There is even a global group working to promote usability through World Usability Day. So just try to understand it, accept it and embrace it. Usability makes your life easier. That is unless they get it wrong or you’re in some minority demographic. Just ask a left hander how difficult life can be.
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