The term usability is used to indicate the ease of use of an object. A more formal definition of usability is: "a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal."[1] The object can be a simple object such as a scissor or it can be a complex one such an aircraft's cockpit.
There are a number of different factors that affect the usability of a system. The so called components of usability are: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Learnability, Guessability, Satisfaction, Memorability etc. [1][2][3][4][5]
Below is a brief explanation of each term to provide a better understanding of them, hence a better understanding of the term usability.
Effectiveness: Producing a desired result successfully. In other words doing the right thing in the right manner.
Efficiency: Producing the results utilizing the minimum number of recourses.
Learnability: The quality of being easy to learn.
Guessability: The quality of being easy to guess the function. Being easy to guess how to deal with the object.
Satisfaction: Fulfillment of the user's expectations and wishes.
Memorability: The quality of being easy to remember the working/operating of the object after being away from it for a while.
A good combination of the above factors results in a system which - no matter how complex - is easy to use.
Reviewing the literature suggests there are more factors that affect a system's usability. However I believe the above definition is pretty much comprehensive for the purpose of this article.
References:
[1] Wikipedia, Jan 08, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability
[2] Wickens, Christopher D. et al. 1998. An Intoruction to Human Factors Engineering. United States: Addison Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.
[3] The TNL.net weblog, Jan 08, http://www.tnl.net/blog/2003/06/18/usability-101-efficiency/
[4] The TNL.net weblog, Jan 08, http://www.tnl.net/blog/2003/06/17/usability-101-learnability/
[5] The TNL.net weblog, Jan 08, http://www.tnl.net/blog/2003/06/19/usability-101-memorability/
0 comments:
Post a Comment