World Usability Day; Usability and Flash

Happy World Usability Day!

If anything, it should be painfully obvious to many of you why we need a day like this. Unfortunately, most of our industry still does not understand how to make usable products. Here's a quick five-point Dummy's Guide to Usability:

  1. Usability is not rocket science.
  2. Usability is not magic.
  3. Your product will not be usable because you tell your team it should be.
  4. Your product will not be usable if you think really, really, really hard about it.
  5. The only way to make usable products is to allocate a budget for it and involve the user throughout the development process.

OK, so it's really a one-point guide. Point 5 basically sums it up. It really isn't rocket science. So why do we get it wrong time and time again, project after project, company after company? Simple. Because we don't follow point 5.

If you're interested in reading more about all this, check out my earlier post, User interface design principles for web applications.

Take a look at what others are doing on World Usability Day and remember that usability doesn't apply just to the virtual world but to the devices around us in the tangible world too.