November 3 is World Usability Day.
Portal and Content Management products are not known for being user friendly. However, I think more and more companies have begun to understand the benefits of usabilty and user centric design practices.
We’ve also recently started a group to spread awareness about usability and to institutionalize good usability practices across all the projects that we do.
If you want to know how to spread awareness about usability, here’s the link.
You are right. Infact usability will be differentiator now.
http://www.humanfactors.com/home/WUDmumbai.asp
The main problem with usability is that nobody thinks it is important to consider this from the beginning. Most projects don’t take their usability needs during their requirements gathering phase and in most instances it is almost like an afterthought. This obviously shows in the implementation. Again unfortunately nobody ever rejects any package based on this factor. Typically it is price, functionality but don’t you think usability should also be a factor.
The tragedy is that most probably the persons affected are the internal users and measuring their productivity losses has always been a challenge.
This is slightly better for a shopping site for example since I think slowly people are realising that they could lose potential customers if they are not careful about how usable their web site is.
As Apoorv says – it is slowly but surely getting better…….
About time as well…
Cheers
Madhu