Although nowadays we are told emphatically by the gurus of Software Development that usability is the key word to keep in mind for our products, we are confronted with more and more applications that are so bloated with options and features that it becomes a real challenge to get anything useful out of them. It seems that software makers are trying to beat the competition not through a more effective product but by presenting a bigger product. In other words: "we give you more features and more options, therefore we are better than the others."
It is quite amazing because the same creativeness that is present in the developers to give us all those features we didn't ask for, could be easily used to give us a faster, more effective and more usable product.
Lately I had a bad experience with one of those applications: a group of ex-workers of the same company needed a site for their reunion. The chosen product was something called Grouply. Being one of their colleagues, I was invited to register and join the group, which I did. The registration was quick and painless, but once I connected to the group, the troubles started. First, I got immediately an invitation to be a "friend" of two fellows from another country. It was obviously a mistake because I have never heard of them before and they did not belong to the firm. Quickly, I got rid of them. Then I proceeded to the "members" tab to try to see which of my colleagues had joined so far. It was impossible to get any intelligible result. I tried two other search functions without any success. Clicking around, all of a sudden I realized that I was out of the group into the generic page of Grouply. Back to the group, more options, more tabs, I was lost again. Finally, I got one search that gave me some results, but soon I realized that browsing through the results I would see the same faces appearing two or three times again on different pages. After playing around for more than one hour, I gave up.
This is a typical example because such an application will be used only once in a while. The next time I go there I will have to do the same exercise and this will be a complete waste of my time...
I don't mind, for instance, to delve into the thousand options of an Eclipse IDE and learn how to get around them because I will be using that product for my daily work. But when you face the same challenge for some application that you will be using only occasionally, the case is totally different. I simply don't want to stay hours in front of the screen in order to learn how to navigate through a maze of menus and tabs, while I know that I would have forgotten most of it when I access the application again next week.
I have to admit that developers (and I am one of them) do enjoy transforming brilliant ideas into new features that will be added to the application. But where are the designers, the architects, the project managers, who should keep things under control and stick to the original design? Where are also the usability experts who should make sure that the final product is indeed a solid and usable system, capable of being handled by the average user?
Software Development is not about being clever and filling up the screen with brilliant features. It is about making a product that satisfies a specific purpose in the easiest and most usable manner. Or am I dreaming?
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