This post was prompted by seeing that Cambridge Usability Group’s first event of 2007 (on February 5th) is titled Selling Usability to Business.

Usability is an important quality in any product but is often neglected in software products. I personally became aware of usability back in 1987 when working as part of a team developing a computer-based training authoring tool - as far as I can remember it never came up in my CS degree course…

I started reading up on usability including authors such as Ben Schneiderman and Donald Norman. I even joined ACM SIGCHI, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, and started to find out more about designing for usability and measuring usability.

Even when I started working more under-the-bonnet, and moved more into software development management, usability was still a factor, although a less direct factor than when I worked on application GUIs. For example, responsiveness to user requests, an important usability consideration, can have a big effect on your application’s back-end architecture.

In my present role usability has become more important again. At present this is primarily related to our web presence at Software Acumen, the Code Generation Network and here at The Variation Point. Long-term visitors to our Software Acumen site will have noticed a number of changes over the years and many of these have been driven by attempts to make the site easier to use. We recognize that we have some way to go with this but this is an area we’ll be devoting more time to later this year. We also have a long-term project to change the underlying platform for the Code Generation Network to make it easier to use and administer (we are also users of this site, and so usability as perceived by us is also important).

To help us make the right changes we use the principles from Jakob Nielsen’s excellent books “Designing Web Usability” and “Prioritizing Web Usability”. We also keep abreast of the latest research results and thoughts from Jakob through subscribing to his fortnightly Alertbox Newsletter. Well worth signing up to if you have any influence on your web site’s usability.

We also take into account feedback we get from site visitors. So, if you have any comments or suggestions please get in touch by emailing me at mark@software-acumen.com.