Talk:Usability
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Much of this page duplicates the content of the page on usability testing, which has been around for several years. Might some of that page be brought here instead? Also, this page was written with a software-only focus. Further, as a technical writer, I've worked with usability issues in web design (which is arguably at least nominally a software issue) but also printed material such as manuals and checklists (which are not). -- Dennis G. Jerz, 30 Aug 2003
Moved here from the article page, where it was not appropriate to be in inline with the text.
[This is too narrow a definition. Usability also has to address fields outside of these two, for example, linguistics and software engineering. The usability engineer has to recommend solutions; if he or she does not understand factors such as the technology or the constraints of the programming language, he or she cannot recommend appropriate solutions -- solutions that can be accomplished. ][The usability experts primary task isn't to recommend solutions but to identify usability flaws by the mentioned methods of usability testing. Finding appropriate and realizable solutions finally has to be a colaboration of the usability expert with the hardware or software engineers. Hardware and software engineers are the experts concerning the inherent constraints of the used technology, usability experts are experts concerning the constraints of human beings (human informational processing abilities for instance) who try to use the hardware or software.] It is important the the usability engineer not have a possible technical solution in mind, this may cause them to ignore issues and concerns which cannot be addressed by the potential solution. It is also important that the usability engineer not be too close organizationally with the developers, since then possible solutions may be discarded as "too much work" or "already considered and rejected".