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Concepts
- Know Your User
- Setting Goals
- Creating Usable Documentation
- UI Design
- Usability Testing
- A Usable CLI
Attributes
- Learnability
- Ease of use
- Memorability
- Few and noncatastrophic errors
- Subjective experience
Usability considerations
Usability includes considerations such as:
- Who are the users, what do they know, and what can they learn?
- What do users want or need to do?
- What is the general background of the users?
- What is the context in which the user is working?
- What has to be left to the computer? What to the user?
Answers to these can be obtained by conducting user and task analysis at the start of the project.
Other considerations include:
- Can users easily accomplish their intended tasks? For example, can users accomplish intended tasks at their intended speed?
- How much training do users need?
- What documentation or other supporting materials are available to help the user? Can users find the solutions they seek in these materials?
- What and how many errors do users make when interacting with the product?
- Can the user recover from errors? What do users have to do to recover from errors? Does the product help users recover from errors, for example, does software present informative, non-threatening error messages?
- Are there provisions for meeting the special needs of users with disabilities? (accessibility)
Examples of ways to find answers to these and other questions are: user-focused requirements analysis, building user profiles, and usability testing.
Usability is now recognized as an important software quality attribute, earning its place among more traditional attributes such as performance and robustness. Indeed various academic programs focus on usability. http://dmoz.org/Computers/Human-Computer_Interaction/Academic/ Also several usability consultancy companies have emerged, and traditional consultancy and design firms are offering similar services.
See also
References
* {{Book reference | Author=Norman, Donald A. | Title=The Design of Everyday Things | Publisher=Basic Books | Year=2002 | ID=ISBN 0-465-067107}} *?Jakob Nielsen: Usability Engineering, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, ISBN 0-12-518406-9 *?Ben Shneiderman: Software Psychology, 1980
External links
Jakob Nielsen on Usability &emdash; Alertbox web column, reports, and links by the web usability expert
Design Basics &emdash; an introduction to some of the basics of usability design, mostly by example
Interaction-Design.org &emdash; an open-content, peer-reviewed Encyclopedia covering terms from the discipline of usability and related fields
Usability Views — a collection of thousands of links to usability related articles.
EServer TC Library: Usability &emdash; a web portal with links to more than 1,000 online usability resources
Society for Technical Communication's Usability Special Interest Group
Bad Human Factors Designs &emdash; "A scrapbook of illustrated examples of things that are hard to use because they do not follow ?human factors principles."
Suggested usability links from ?Human Factors International &emdash; include education and research programs, professional certification programs and associations, practice guides and federal standards.
Article "Serendipity: Usability Has Five Syllables." by ?Kris Chapman
Usability.gov - Usability basics from the US Department of Health and Human Services
See UsabilityLinks