Tohir Solomons

Usability-wise – What are you saying?

Posted on the July 1st, 2005 under Uncategorized by Tohir

We can say things by saying them. We can also say things not by our communication, but the analysis people give to what we say and do. And this last one is more far-reaching. People start making judgments on what you say and do.

This is not without reason. They are reflecting on what you are saying and producing. Does it make sense? It is productive, is it counter-productive? Does it leave a good impression, or not? Is this piece of work and attempt at excellence, or just another mediocre one, quickly put together to get the ‘work’ done?

And these are some of the things that go through my mind when I view websites from a usability perspective. Now to be honest, my knowledge of usability is limited to my experience. I am eternally grateful to my lecturer, Lynn Coleman, for showing my this dimension of quality. We (Cecelia Barron, Eugene van der Heever, and myself) designed what I perceived to be an excellent project in 2002. It was excellent, but there was room for improvement on the usability side. We didn’t consider all the user tasks. In retrospect, we can only imagine the frustration users would have to go through.

But having been exposed to another quality aspect to web development, I took to researching this further by myself. What guidelines and recommendations are there to improve your work? What should you ‘keep in mind’ when you are developing websites?

And this is where I feel I need to differ from colleagues in the analysis of what they say. The first step of usability is humanity. Do you recognise we are humans, we make mistakes, we have shortcomings, we look for the easy way. Do you recognise this in yourself?

If you want others to be benevolent to you, you also need to be benevolent towards others. Prof Yusuf da Costa’s statement that “People who do things for themselves, their ‘contribution’ dies with them” is true from a usability perspective. If you do not care about your users, they won’t care about you, what you ‘developed’, and ‘your contribution dies with you’. No one is bothering to use it.

And perhaps the greatest irony of usability is this: Thinking of your users, taking into account their weaknesses – this does not make your project weaker. On the contrary, it improves the quality of your project. It makes your project rise above the mediocre ones in terms of excellence. And this is all because you thought of your users BEFORE you started coding, DURING the period you were coding, and AFTER you have coded. The last process some will recognise as: What else can I do to make this ‘application’ (no longer considered as code) easier to use?

Be careful what you say usability wise. It is a reflection of yourself. It reflects your humanity, and lack of it. It reflects your benevolence, and lack of it. In any type of development work, it is a reflection of yourself. And your greatest judges are … your users!