What features can improve the usability of a WebApp

Question

i am looking for new features and ideas to improve the overall usability of our internal webapp (straight LOB-App with some CRM features)

i bet there is ton of those waiting the get found. as an example:

recently i tried out rememberthemilk.com a task tracking application which has the feature to enter dates in natural language, so instead of using the date picker or entering the date itself, because grabbing the mouse actually takes longer (but forces you to think about what the date is), you can just write "today" or "tomorrow" or "end of month" or "in 2 weeks". that feature really got me, every time i use another application now, i wonder why i cant do this here. i wonder why other application make me thing about what date "next friday" is. i dont care! but i do care that my boss just said "i need this till next friday".

1 feature/idea per answer please.

Answer 1

Learn User Experience Design

...developers are nutoriously bad at developing usable interfaces for their applications. We make them to make sense to us but not the user.

One of the things that stuck with me about human cognition is that the human mind can focus the best when it has to concentrate best when it has 5 +/- 2 things to worry about. Therefore the most effective interface will, at most, present the user with 5 +/- 2 elements to work with at any given time. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed.

Answer 2

Take a look at Nielsen's list of 10 Heuristics for Usability Design. Entire courses and books are designed around these 10 laws - they're very appropriate and I really wish more companies would use them (I'm looking at you, Adobe).

http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

Answer 3

The #1 way to improve the user experience is to do some usability testing, find someone who is unfamiliar with the application and ask them to do some simple tasks, record the session with screen recording software.

Sometimes it's difficult for people to explain why they think using an application is difficult, simple watching someone perform basic functions can help you find issues that the user may have have considered to be a problem.