Usability 101: Introduction

As I men­tioned ear­lier, I am start­ing to take a look at the usabil­ity issues related to open source project. As a kick-off for this, I’d like to go over some usabil­ity basics, which could help just about any OSS projects.

In Usabil­ity Engi­neer­ing, Jakob Nielsen men­tions five con­cepts to remem­ber when it comes to usability:

1. Learn­abil­ity: How easy the sys­tem is to use.
2. Effi­ciency: How well the sys­tems’ inter­face maps to what some­one is try­ing to do.
3. Mem­o­ra­bil­ity: How well the sys­tem allows peo­ple to remem­ber how to do things.
4. Errors: How well the sys­tem pre­vents errors and allows recov­ery from them.
5. Sat­is­fac­tion: How sat­is­fied a user is with the system

We will exam­ine each of those points over the next few days, pro­vid­ing a basic frame­work into usable sys­tems. Along the way, I will touch on some of the open source pieces of soft­ware cur­rently avail­able and offer poten­tial solu­tions to some of the usabil­ity prob­lems they have.