Comments on: Why Web Sites With Poor Usability Are Still Being Developed

By: Danielle Arad

Danielle Arad — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:47:00 +0000

Justin, it’s great to come across this post and see that it is still extremely relevant to what we are seeing today with web usability and ux guidelines. Thanks for referring to it in the LinkedIn conversation.

By: Anne Miles

Anne Miles — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:38:02 +0000

When you have graphic artists who primarily work in print. designing websites then you can get poor usability. Many times the design is more about being “cool” and may be very trendy as opposed to being usable -or- a good user experience.

great article.

By: Justin Mifsud

Justin Mifsud — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:03:40 +0000

Hi Bruce,

First of all, thanks for your comments.

I do agree with you that usability is still unknown in most organizations. In this post I focused more on solving the problems (thus assuming that the company is aware of usability in the first place). This is because I had already covered the topic of “selling” usability” in previous posts and one my main recommendations was that one should explain to stakeholders within a company what usability is, before explaining its commercial benefits.

I think that usability is still not mainstream. But then again, so was SEO a couple of years ago. I am quite positive that as more time passes, more organizations become aware of usability and start catering for it as part of their development process.

Cheers and thanks for commenting

Justin

By: Bruce Melendy

Bruce Melendy — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:52:36 +0000

These are very useful insights – for projects where usability is already recognized as a problem. Don’t assume however that most clients are aware of the problem, let alone any of the solutions. Where I work, 18 months ago the word ‘usability’ was never mentioned. Then suddenly someone pulled the plug on a project because it ‘wasn’t usable’. Suddenly we had a usability problem – and usability awareness. I would say that is barrier #1 to seeing more usable sites. If usability isn’t on your radar, you aren’t likely to *have* guidelines, let alone things like usability-specific requirements or testing.

It’s not just the developers who aren’t aware, it’s the business owners, the business analysts, the project managers, the testers, the sys admins, the delivery managers – everybody. And again – the first problem isn’t that they haven’t been to usability.gov – it’s that they have no idea that ‘usability’ is a *concept*, much less a problem. This is the big hurdle. Getting people to acknowledge that usability is a *thing* – and that it’s something they need to care about – is half the battle (at least).