by Manel Fernando

Last week I was in the process of buying a product online from a site which I haven't visited before. After hours of searching and selecting the right product and adding it to my shopping basket, it was time for me to check out. As I had a promotion code which gave me 20% discount, I was looking for the field to apply the promotion code. Unfortunately to my surprise this field was nowhere to be seen. After going through several links in the page and close to call the customer support I finally found the promotion code field I was looking for. Being a regular online shopper you can imagine my frustration in wasting so much time (and money for calls) for something so trivial!

Well that's my story and I am sure you may have had similar experiences when using websites. Ever wondered why? One common cause to the problem is the lack of importance paid to the 'usability' aspect of an application. It's just no good developing a product if the users cannot use it easily. 

At a Glance

In this blog I'm aiming to give the reader an understanding of the importance of 'usability' of an application and to provide some guidance on what can be done in order to improve the usability of applications. The list of activities mentioned below covers the entire spectrum of the development life cycle starting from business analysis, requirements gathering, designing and development and finally testing.

What is Usability?

Usability is the ease with which people can use a particular product in order to achieve a particular objective.

Web usability is an approach to make web sites easy to use for an end-user, without requiring the user to undergo any specialized training

Is Usability and Accessibility the same?

The short answer is No; while these are not the same, Usability and Accessibility often are complimentary.

Usability focuses on how intuitively and easily the product can be used by its intended users.

Accessibility is determined by how barrier free the technology is. Accessibility problems are those that make it more difficult for people with disabilities to use an application or service than for a non-disabled person.

Achieving the Goal

As evident from the above example, usability is a very important (but often ignored) characteristic of a software product / application. Any desire in building a highly user-friendly application requires careful consideration of the set of activities that needs to be carried out in each phase of the software development life cycle.

The next section briefly describes some important things that need to be done in each of the phases in the development life cycle.

Usability Requirements Analysis

Similar to gathering functional requirements of a product, the objective here is to ensure that all usability requirements are gathered, defined and integrated into the product's requirements specification.

Some of the important criteria gathered in this process involve:

• Identifying the set of end users who will be using the system
• Understanding the characteristics of the end user
• Understanding environment / social factors that may affect usability
• Understanding the context in which users would use the application
• Which tasks are performed by the system (automated)
• Involving the end users of the product during the initial requirements gathering phase
• Identifying any usability related issue in the current applications the users are using

Next week I will look at Design and Development Considerations in more detail.