What is Usability?
Here’s the short story. I created a short (4 minute) video answering this question: What is usability?
I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t perfect but I care much more about getting the information out to people than getting the video perfect. Makes sense, right?
If you don’t have time to watch I talk about usability as both an attribute and a method. I also give 3 “formal” definitions by Ginny Redish, Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug.
If you’re already familiar with usability then the What is Usability? video will be too basic for you. Just skip it. Then again, maybe you could view the video, rate it, and bookmark it for me. That would be smashing!
July 24th, 2008 at 10:17 am
I can’t learn your answer to “What is usability?” because videos aren’t usable. : )
July 24th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
How about the following definition:
Users need to handle two basic problems:
What should I do? Which is defined by the user (or for the user by someone else) and how do I do it? Which is defined by the application creator.
Better usability results in less allocation of mental resources to answer this question.
So, basically, usability is about reducing the users’ mental burden by providing good answers to the ‘how’ problem, thus allowing them to concentrate on the ‘what’ problem