3AugWhen usability issues go beyond annoyance

For the last few years “usability” has been one of the buzzwards of the tech industry. As a revolutionary concept, “usability” is a software development process which approaches development with the end user in mind (imagine that!).

However many products still contain usability issues that really should be classified as bugs or design flaws. The type of issues that we’re referring to, are those which cost customers time and money. Let’s look at two examples that we recently came across in some technical writing tools.

First up is a popular video tutorial authoring software package. While this package is generally well thought out, we came across one issue which cost us hours.

The package allows smaller video clips to be spliced together and also allows you to zoom in on certain parts of the screen. However what it doesn’t allow you to do is to extend a zoom across these clips. As a result you must re-add the same zoom to the start of each clip. So if you have dozens of clips this process can take hours. As if this wasn’t bad enough, there is also a bug where on the last frame of a zoom, the zoom parameters are ignored and the whole screen is shown for that one frame. The only solution to this problem is the “bake out” the entire video as one clip, create a whole new project and manually remove each problematic frame.

Our second example is a well known software package which allows you to create and layout editable PDF files. Like most programs you can copy and paste elements between documents in its multi-document interface. Given that it supports laying out PDF elements, it should be geared for easy layout work. Unfortunately its copy and paste functionality falls short in this area. When items are copied from one form and pasted into a new form, they are pasted wherever the mouse pointer is currently located instead of at the coordinates where the item in the source form was located at.

While this may sound minor, it makes copying and pasting items which need to appear in the same location on multiple forms impossible. In addition to copying the element itself, you also have to copy and paste each x and y coordinate. This triples the effort required to copy and paste an item, and when done hundreds of times per day, it can add up to hours of wasted time; not to mention that it makes the process error prone.

So for those in the business of producing software, our advice is to build usability design and testing into your development process as early as possible. Your customers will be that much more productive and your product will be well received.