Usability is King
When it comes to the purity of developing software for people, there’s only 2 things that matter:
- The people find the software useful, and thus use it
- The people enjoy using the software because the software is easy to use.
I’m not going to go on a long diatribe about usability, how Microsoft doesn’t get it and Apple does, or how hard good usability is to create. I’m not even going to tell you that good usability is just 20 feet away from you, or if you’re one of the lucky few developers, a girlfriend away. We all know that research into good usability is affordable, timely, requires just a little bit of creative thinking and doesn’t require super duper expensive laboratories , so I’m not going to bore you with that.
Instead, what I am going to bore you with is this quick and easy statement: There is no excuse for terrible usability, especially in the most simple of scenarios. No sir, you can try and blame the user, or show somebody that it’s “simple” (followed by 17 mouse clicks), or tell somebody that it’ll make sense “after they get their head around it”, or that they “just need to re-read it because they just don’t get it”, sure, go ahead. But at the end of the day it’s all you, baby, with the proverbial egg on your face. How’s it taste?
Some of these issues are so overwhelmingly glaringly embarrassing it’s sad. This morning, while I was grabbing stuff off my Samba share from my Vista laptop, Microsoft thought it’d be a good idea to confirm what, exactly, it was that I wanted to do.
Well, I’d like to copy them, of course! So I’ll just – wait… uh… wha? There is no excuse for something like the above dialog. Seriously. That’s just downright silly. Maybe if English is your 3rd language, and you just picked it up last week, and you’re writing software for a Western client and you don’t have access to a single person that speaks English at a 2nd grade level, than yes, I suppose you have an excuse. But Not if you’re the world’s biggest software company… hell, not even if you’re the mom & pop shop on the corner.
One of the things that I love about where I work is that big, hulking, gentle Polish giant Allan Wolinski. Sure, the guy never updates his blog (hint), but he’s always updating my Jira list of assigned issues with really kick ass ideas surrounding Usability. I couldn’t possibly write a crappy application working with Allan – he just simply would not allow it.
So to all the people out there who take 5 minutes of their day and quickly hand sketch their ideas on paper and kidnap a coworker and ask them what they think – I solute you. For it is you that is making computing better by not asking me open ended questions and only accepting 1 of 2 closed answers that make no contextual sense.
What are some of your favourite little (un)Usability whoopsies that you’ve stumbled across?
