Usability
Try holding your breath for as long as it takes your homepage to load. - Tony Karp, Art and the Zen of Web Sites
What is usability?
There is an evolution that takes place whenever people use something.
Imagine the world passing a brick around from hand to hand. Over time, its edges soften until it's a smooth, rounded stone. An optimal shape has formed by being used and the brick has now "adapted" to an ideal shape for further travel among human hands.
Usability is all about harnessing this evolutionary process.
Another example - imagine you're an architect. You've got to lay down some paths for the interior courtyard of an office block complex. In deciding where to put them, you may try to take into consideration a mass of human variables, such as:
- where are the building's most common entry and exit points?
- which is the shortest route to the cafeteria from popular exit points?
- are certain large companies likely to liase - and what's the best route between them?
It's a daunting task until you let the problem solve itself. A practical solution might be to lay no paths, just sand. After a few months, you could return to lay down paths in the tracks people had created.
When people use something, it becomes distilled, until you're left with a refined essence. Sometimes an even more surprising magic arises when that essence has found application beyond its creator's imagining - just like a successful evolutionary mutation.
Recommended Reading
- How we really use the Web by Steve Krug
- Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir
- Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark
Links
- Web Accessibility Initiative
- Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
- useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
- Advanced Common Sense
- Joe Clark: Accessibility | Design | Writing
Document Links
- How we really use the Web
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Excerpted from Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability - Steve Krug
http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html
- Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
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Book by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir
New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis
ISBN 0-73571-102-X
http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/
- Building Accessible Websites
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Bibliographic details
* Author: Clark, Joe
* Publisher: New Riders
* Publication date: October 2002
* Copyright: 2003 (inexplicably)
* ISBN: 0-7357-1150-X
http://www.joeclark.org/book/
- Web Accessibility Initiative
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WAI develops
* guidelines widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility
* support materials to help understand and implement Web accessibility
* resources, through international collaboration
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
- Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
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Section508.gov is a resource for information on Section 508 of the Disablities Act. The website also contains a searchable database of accessible products by supporting vendors.
http://www.section508.gov/
- useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
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Alertbox column, Web usability, usability engineering, and Jakob's minimalist approach to Web design; Jakob's biography. Conferences and training events.
http://useit.com/
- Advanced Common Sense
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Advanced Common Sense is the online home of Web usability consultant Steve Krug.
http://www.sensible.com/
- Joe Clark: Accessibility | Design | Writing
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Joe does consulting and research on accessibility – mostly topics like captioning, audio description, and Web accessibility. His writing includes hundreds of articles.
http://www.joeclark.org/