Usability

Good design is important for making things usable. Donald Norman has long been an advocate for good ergonomics. Now I see that Houtlust has examples of advertisements for something called World Usability Day 2006.

 

I’d not heard of this event, or the organisation behind it, before now. Mind you, I can’t help but notice, with the raising of an ironical eyebrow, that one of the companies sponsoring World Usability Day is the German software company SAP. As someone who still bears the scars of battling with SAP software, which has quite possibly the most appallingly designed user interfaces in the known universe, I have to wonder why they are sponsoring World Usability Day. I’d like to think it was out of some sort of penance, but I fear that they actually believe that they are doing a good job in usability design.