Usability

Try holding your breath for as long as it takes your homepage to load. - Tony Karp, Art and the Zen of Web Sites

What is usability?

There is an evolution that takes place whenever people use something.

Imagine the world passing a brick around from hand to hand. Over time, its edges soften until it's a smooth, rounded stone. An optimal shape has formed by being used and the brick has now "adapted" to an ideal shape for further travel among human hands.

Usability is all about harnessing this evolutionary process.

Another example - imagine you're an architect. You've got to lay down some paths for the interior courtyard of an office block complex. In deciding where to put them, you may try to take into consideration a mass of human variables, such as:

where are the building's most common entry and exit points?
which is the shortest route to the cafeteria from popular exit points?
are certain large companies likely to liaise - and what's the best route between them?

It's a daunting task until you let the problem solve itself. A practical solution might be to lay no paths, just sand. After a few months, you could return to lay down paths in the tracks people had created.

When people use something, it becomes distilled, until you're left with a refined essence. Sometimes an even more surprising magic arises when that essence has found application beyond its creator's imagining - just like a successful evolutionary mutation.

Document Links

Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability: "Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them."
http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed: "Homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world. Millions of dollars are funneled through a space that's not even a square foot in size."
http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/

Building Accessible Websites: A declaration of what accessibility is and should be: “The true reason to design for accessibility is greed. Quite simply, I want it all, and so should you. Give us everything you’ve got. Give us everything there is to give”
http://www.joeclark.org/book/

Web Accessibility Initiative: "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Section 508: The Road to Accessibility: Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.
http://www.section508.gov/

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website: Alertbox Jakob's column on Web usability
http://useit.com/

Advanced Common Sense: Advanced Common Sensesm is the online home of Web usability consultant Steve Krug.
http://www.sensible.com/

Joe Clark: Accessibility | Design | Writing: Joe Clark does consulting and research on accessibility – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
http://www.joeclark.org/

Usability

What is usability?

Recommended Reading

Links

Document Links