Monthly Archive for June 2003
Usability 101: Satisfaction
Today, we continue the Usability 101 series by exploring the concept of satisfaction. I can’t get no… satisfaction As much as we’d like it to, users are not using our software because of love for developers. They are using it to accomplish a task. How satisfied they are with usability of the software package they use is [...]
Tags: Browser, open source, usability
In Technology
Usability 101: Errors
The usability 101 series continues. Over the past few days, we’ve covered learnability, efficiency, and memorability. Today, we will cover errors, how well the system should prevent them and how it should allow recovery from them. Things break You may design the perfect system but eventually, your system will fail. How it does so, however, can make [...]
In Technology
Usability 101: Memorability
Having covered learnability and efficiency as the first two elements of usability, it is now time to turn to memorability. What is memorability? The concept of memorability, within the usability context, is that a user can leave a program and, when he or she returns to it, remember how to do things in it. How many times [...]
Tags: usability
In Technology
Usability 101: Efficiency
On Monday, I highlighted the five basic points of usability. Yesterday, I delved further into the concept of learnability. Today, we are focusing on the concept of efficiency. What is efficiency? Efficiency relates to how fast a user accomplish tasks once he or she has learned to use a system. The basic idea behind it is that, [...]
Tags: Java, Microsoft, usability
In Technology
Usability 101: Learnability
The concept of learnability is a key one to usability design. Basically, it boils down to how easy a system is to learn. This, in turn, can be broken down into five components: familiarity consistency generalizability predictability simplicity Let’s delve further into each of those in more details. Familiarity The concept of familiarity is almost self explanatory. It talks to the way people [...]
Tags: Microsoft, OS, XML, usability
In Technology
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: Learnability: [...]
Tags: usability
In Technology
