Usability

What is Usability?

Usability is a term used to define the ease with which user can interact with the software or website in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability is very much measurable and should be used to assess the user interface during the entire SDLC.

Why usability is important?

Usability helps designers and developers (especially BAs) to improve the user experience with the software, some of the user benefits from usability are:

• Improve understanding the product and reduce learning curve
• Increases user satisfaction and trust in the product
• Improve speed and accuracy in recording information
• Improve rapid recovery from error and invalid data inputs
• Easy to remember

Define conventions and best practice to improve general usability for your organization; use this to evaluate every product shipped out of the door.
Investigate and define usability for every age group, demographic, ethnographic or any other category of your users, this is very important as every group of people interacts with software is different way, you can achieve this by running focus group meetings and in-depth interviews.

Tools
Usability is a concept and as such you don’t need any tools to implement it, but there are plenty of usability software which can be used to gather, collate and present information and resources about issues related to usability in software or website design. One tool I can recommend is Morae from TechSmith you can download a free trial from http://www.techsmith.com/morae.asp