Web Usability

Usability as a word sounds just like it means - are you able to use something for the purpose intended. Also, it has a deeper meaning where you are looking for something with greater usefulness. I go to the spaghetti example. You can remove al dente spaghetti from a boiling pot of water using a cooking spoon, a slotted cooking spoon, tongs or a spaghetti or pasta fork. The last being the best option to strain excess water and deposit a serving size onto the plate or bowl. In terms of usability, all could remove the pasta but one did it best.

As web developers, we strive to find the spaghetti fork for our viewers. Then everything works fine as long as we don't cook penne, gnocchi or bow tie pasta - then we need a new tool.

It is incumbent on us to make sure we develop with the user in mind and offer the best possible set of tools to enhance the web experience. When develop, it is important to think about what we are wanting the page to do. How are we expecting it to be used. Develop it and then double check that it does what we expect. When we get that far, we need to step back and have someone completely not affiliated with the project use the demo site and see if we have truly achieved the goal. Do they use it in the same manner we do? Do they get the same results? If not, what are they doing that another user might do?

In this way, usability and accessibility is intermingled. Everything involves the user's experience from the clicks that they make to the time spent on the pages. I like to think of usability as being 'fit for the purpose intended.' With that in mind, we can create a highly accessible page that does what we say it does, and then actually does it.

More later,

clh