how important is usability to your workplace/employer?

Question

If asked, I would bet that every manager would agree that software usability is important. Unfortunately, when it comes time to put their money where there mouths are, they shy away and tell the programmer to just make it usable. What is everyone's experience with usability in the workplace? Is there a usability team? How many people have usability as their primary job role? What is the ratio of usability experts to programmers? Is the usability team taken seriously?

If there is no usability team, what does your company do to address usability of software? Does it work?

Answer 1

Our main product is an end-user website. We have put our primary efforts into the design of the usability and processes throughout the website (including hiring a usability/process expert). A website that isn't friendly to use for the average person out there is not going to be popular, it isn't going to get good word of mouth, and thus we will make less money, and that's not good.

Answer 2

The project I'm currently working on is an internal ASP.NET application. Usability does not factor into the PM's decisions at all, and testing or making changes for usability is (indirectly) discouraged. Things generally mimic what the database is actually doing, rather than being an efficient user view into the data.

Does it work? No. The UI is chaotic, inconsistent to the point where the same button does different things depending on the page, and components are reused willy-nilly: in many cases, a control is plonked onto a page simply because the data it represents is joined to the data that another control on the page handles, even if the two things are only tangentially related. Even the developers on this project (myself included) occasionally have difficulty using the application.

Answer 3

People could not realise that usability is important for them. However if the usability rules are followed the application usually receives much more positive feedback from the users and the acceptance phase is much smoother.

Therefore we always try to think about the usability of our products when we work for the clients, even if they don't - mostly because it saves money and effort :)

Answer 4

We do the whole RAD cycle on our website.

1. Get a working example.
2. Brainstorm and implement new features.
3. Fix bugs. Compatibility issues are a type of bug to us.
4. Moan about IE sucking.
5. Fix small things like font size, wording and colour scheme.

Answer 5

My company has a usability team of 2 people. The team was created less than five years ago. There are close to 100 programmers. The usability team typically specializes in new development. Because of this, our existing programs have often been untouched by usability people.

Both people in the usability group have taken some kind of usability certification course. I'm not sure just what that means, and how important it is to be certified.

Answer 6

In terms of web usability, the same issues can be applied, but I would add that web accessibility (especially W3C standards) go hand-in-hand with usability. Having code that validates against W3C (http://validator.w3.org/), both in terms of your markup and CSS, goes a long way to ensuring that a given page can be rendered across browsers and allows users who need help (eg being able to scale fonts because of low-vision) can properly do so.

Answer 7

I think as a developer, as you are creating something you should try to envision how a person is going to use the application and create it so that they can do their job quickly. A small team isn't going to be able to have a usability person. I think if you work with the requester closely enough where they can continuously give you feedback, you'll have a solid product for your users.

You need to be careful with how much they control the look verses the framework you are using to create the site, but if they are the primary person(s) using it, they should have something they are comfortable using.