What Makes Something Usable?

      What is usable? “the user can do what he or she wants to do the way he or she expects to be able to do it, without hindrance, hesitation, or questions is nothing but usable” Usefulness concerns the degree to which a product enables a user to achieve his or her goals, and is an assessment of the user’s willingness to use the product at all. Without that motivation, other measures make no sense, because the product will just sit on the shelf. it will not be used even if it is given away for free.

Reasons why products are less usable:

·         Lack of proper product management in the system

·         Design and development don’t always match

·         Designing usable products is difficult

Lack of proper product management in the system:

              As technology has penetrated the mainstream consumer market, the target audience has expanded and continues to change dramatically. Development organizations have been slow to react to this evolution. This is where the existence of  proper product management occurred to bridge in between consumer and technology. If there is no proper product management, the whole development and Vision will be hallucination not fit for realistic environment.

Design and development don’t always match:

    The design of the user interface and the technical implementation are two different activities infect they are opposite poles, requiring very different skills. Design, in this case, relates to how the product communicates to user, whereas implementation refers to how it works for the user. So they never match completely.

Designing usable product is difficult:

           Because of uncertainty of the requirements predicting the endeavors is always been challenge hence it has significant adverse effect on the designs. It’s all about using the “common sense”  during design phase. And a systematic approach in applying so-called ‘‘common sense’’ to the design process.

What makes product more usable?

·         Early focus on users and their tasks

·         Evaluating the product usage

Early focus on users and their tasks:

          Stop classifying the user by identification theoretically and categorizing into different set of user persona's. Try to contact the user directly and include them in the whole life product cycle.

Evaluating the product usage:

            Through the development and testing prototypes to direct user and ask them to evaluate it get the emphasis is placed on ease of usage and behavioral measurements.

Bad Estimations vs Good Estimations

        Many people thinks that accurate project estimation is Rocket science. This makes some intuitive sense at first glance, it seems that estimation is a highly subjective process. But subjective estimations never help in any organization in any way :). Usually one person might take a day to do a task that might only require a few hours of another’s time.. As a result, when several people are asked to estimate how long it might take to perform a task, they will often give widely differing answers. But when the work is actually performed, it takes a real amount of time; any estimate that did not come close to that actual time is inaccurate.

Elements for successful estimation:

     Good estimations can be achieved form good design. Good design can leads a good prediction and judgments, hence more realistic estimations. Good engineering estimates are possible only if you have two things: good information/design and good engineers. If the specs are crap, and a programmers are asked to come up with estimations it will be more scribbling ad hoc timings rather a good realistic, accurate timings.

    A sound and realistic estimations can be achieved when we do work break down structure. Again work break down structure is something which can be achieved in different ways and it’s handy when you use previous project lessons learned and failures in estimations. Generally the more inspiring the final goal and challenging the deadline, the more key stakeholders are tempted to compromise on best principles of planning, management, control and also badly on quality as well :( which I hate always.