Is user-friendliness an important aspect of the quality of software? For example most of the Microsoft products are quite user friendly, but does that necessarily imply that their quality is superior too.
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161answers:
4
+2
A:
Quality is the measure of completeness of the requirements or the completeness of features in a product scenario.
User-friendliness is one of the features, right? So yes, it's part of the quality. So, one can say the Quality of User-friendliness of MS Excel is great but the quality of its memory management is not that great, as it gets slower and stucks at times when there're 100K rows.
Salman Kasbati
2008-11-11 06:44:55
A:
User-friendlyness is definitely an important aspect of software quality, but it is often more elusive than maintaining stability (i.e. absence of software errors). A program can have a hideous and unusable user-interface but be perfectly stable. Such a program would grade very high on the quality scale, IMO.
JesperE
2008-11-11 06:45:23
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A:
There is no relationship. An easy to use product doesn't mean that it is high quality.
'Quality' can be defined as whatever you want it to mean. Does quality mean easy to use? Or lack of bugs? Or good performance?
Easy to use varies among users - is the Office Ribbon easy to use? Depends on who you ask and their experience with it.
dan gibson
2008-11-11 06:48:03
I agree. Quality goals are whatever you have specified in your requirements. If you didn't specify a certain level of user-friendliness (if you can even quantifiably measure that), then you can't say it's low quality even if it's hard to use, because you didn't require it to be.
Xiaofu
2008-11-11 06:56:23
And I think you meant to say "An easy to use product DOESN'T mean that it is high quality"?
Xiaofu
2008-11-11 06:57:04
So, there is a relationship!
Salman Kasbati
2008-11-11 07:07:31
Here, we're only talking about a particular scenario, the definition of quality varies, that's agreed. But in this particular case, IMHO the person who asked the question just wants to know what are the weightages of quality factors. And of course, the product always have targetted users.
Salman Kasbati
2008-11-11 07:12:45
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A:
User friendliness is definitly a quality factor (ISO 9126 agrees there with me ;-). But from the MS example I guess that your "quality" refers more to the quality factor "functionality". And indeed they do not relate in any way, I know examples for any combination:
- Good usability, good functionality
- Bad usability, bad functionality
- Bad usability, good functionality
- good usability, bad functionality
Often the user is temped to take case 4 (2) for 1(3) because, if the user often perceives the usability as functionality.
flolo
2008-11-11 08:22:24