TIME TO PRAISE THE “INVISIBLE ART” BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF USABILITY ON EVERYDAY LIFE?
At Critical TechWorks, the quality of a user’s experience when seeking to accomplish something – like finishing a task or using a product – is something we care about and have been dealing with for some time now. So it comes as no surprise that we’ve decided to extend World Usability Day (powered by the World Usability Initiative, on 11 November each year) to a complete month – hence, Usability Month.
EFFECTIVENESS, EFFICIENCY AND SATISFACTION. Easier said than done, certainly, but this is a good starting point for bringing our community together – not just designers and
web developers, but the whole team – to raise awareness and reflect on this important quality attribute (ISO 9241).
"IF SOMEBODY IS USING THE PRODUCT, USABILITY MUST BE A TEAM CONCERN". As the Usability Month organising committee explains: “Usability is all about putting the user at the centre, at each phase of product development, by addressing every
possible frustration and understanding how it can be successful.” Frustration… Haven’t we all been there on occasion? To help with such a challenge, behaviour and interaction patterns that have proved efficient in the past are recurrently used on interfaces. But this is just one of the ways of transforming usability ordeals into helpful tools that embrace similarities and create conditions to produce better outcomes.
Technology plays a key role in expanding opportunities if we want to shape the future – CTW is not only changing the way the world moves, by working on how people interact with technology, but it is also influencing the development of technologies that are intentionally designed to have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Usability itself is a vast topic, and an entire generation of human-machine interaction professionals are devoting their careers to advancing the field and improving user experiences. As the saying goes, “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”, so teamwork is key to usability. UX experts, product owners, development teams, users and stakeholders all have a say in the final solution – and you can get involved too.
During this month, we held several talks and hands-on sessions about usability impacts: creating an action plan to measure the return on investment from the UX project and sharing real CTW project cases where usability failed were some of the insights on our agenda.
However, this is not a casual celebration: Community events are being held every two months, which can bring everyone closer to usability, using shared knowledge and learning experiences, led by our very own UX gurus. #usabilitymatters