{"id":218,"date":"2014-06-10T22:05:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T22:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/measuringu.com\/fundamental-usability\/"},"modified":"2021-01-28T06:29:56","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T06:29:56","slug":"fundamental-usability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/measuringu.com\/fundamental-usability\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Fundamental Concept in Usability"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> Usability is a lot of things.<\/p>\n

It’s about making interfaces easy to learn. It’s about preventing errors and reducing the time to get things done.<\/p>\n

It’s even about making an experience more satisfying and delightful.<\/p>\n

There are a number of methods<\/a> to improve the usability of an interface. While it’s hard to identify one overarching concept that’s fundamental to the whole idea of usability, I think there’s one that underlies most methods and desirable outcomes. That concept is that the developer is not the user. <\/b><\/p>\n

That is, the people who build the interface are different from the people who use the interface.<\/p>\n

Developers can be users too of course. In some rare cases, the developer programming the interface or designing the look and feel is one of the people who may eventually use the interface themselves.<\/p>\n

But because of the high demand to build software, mobile apps and web-applications, it’s much more likely that the developers know very little about the target users and will never use the applications they are developing.<\/p>\n

The reason this is such a fundamental concept is that the very act of detailing how an application will work, the programming and the designing, involves making assumptions about how people will react to and interact with design elements. The technical structure of programming languages and the functional requirements take priority over ethereal user goals.<\/p>\n

The problem is usually compounded because development teams are often given details about users and functional specs via proxies (product managers, business analysts, etc.) and have little contact with users themselves.<\/p>\n

Developer != User<\/h2>\n

The famous study by Stanford Professor Phillip Zimbardo<\/a> showed that you can take ordinary people and give them a role (prisoner or jailer) and people will adapt to the role–thinking and acting quite differently.<\/p>\n

Alan Cooper<\/a>, the father of Visual Basic, takes the Zimbardo idea and says that to be a good programmer, one must be “sympathetic to the nature and needs of the computer. But the nature and needs of the computer are alien from the nature and needs of the human being who will ultimately use the software.”<\/p>\n

The product managers and business executives who order the development of the software that fills our lives aren’t the ones in control. It’s the engineers who are running the show. Cooper argues that this is tantamount to the inmates running the asylum!<\/p>\n

A recent discussion on Quora about things programmers know that the rest of us don’t illustrates this point. One web developer reinforces<\/a> Cooper’s point by stating:<\/p>\n

About 25% of the hours spent writing an application are spent figuring out ways the end user will do something wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For example, I have four bills in front of me<\/p>\n