Does Usability Really Exist?

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Does Usability Really Exist?

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Time and again, I hear this word very often as one of the supposed important considerations that you have to make whenever you are designing you are a website. I'm talking about web usability. What is it, anyway, and what does it have to do with designing your webpage?  Perhaps we could even go the extra mile and ask if it really exists.

In a word, usability is the aspect of user interface (UI) design studying whether particular applications are usable by the ordinary consumer. Yeah, right. That was far from being very descriptive, I know. But that's just how vague it really is. It is the study of the ease of usage of a particular tool, with respect to their efficiency at operating it.

Surprisingly, with billions of dollars invested towards usability research, there has been little study whether this ideal actually exists. International standards themselves that define usability do not even have any evidence suggesting that usability really exists, just some reminders or guidelines on what it really is. Maybe we can look at it, as one blog has suggested, as an abstract concept, much like intelligence. You cannot confidently measure intelligence, as it has many facets.

In any case, as far as one of my former bosses has told me, it is in his opinion that usability doesn't actually exist--or at the very least, rules establishing the usability of something are actually not good for anything at all. Take the example of a software such as the VI editor. For a non-technical user, a VI editor cannot be considered usable, because the usual shortcuts and buttons are not there. For a technical user, however, this is very usable if he is perfectly aware of the shortcuts in the editor. In fact, sometimes a word processor like Microsoft Office can be less usable for some people.

So what is usable, really? We can only argue because in the end, we cannot determine who is actually right at defining the term, nor find out if it really exists.

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Tags: • vi editor • international standards • usability • web usability • user interface • word processor • microsoft office •

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