Usability, Usability, Usability
Just begin with some of the many good and bad examples of usability cases. In google search, when you click the "search" button after typing in the keywords, at the top of the search result a tip will appear saying "Tip: Save time by hitting the return key instead of clicking on ’search’ ". This approach is light footprint yet effective. The users see the tip right after they did a "stupid" thing. They have the motivation to try the tip right on the spot and found it really helped. This whole process of stupidity->gotcha->cool happens in a streamline and I believe the user will remember the tip in the bone.
In live search, when users type in a non-English keyword, there are very small amount of snippets/summary for the non-English sites in its own language, which is not very international user friendly. Those who typed in a non-English language keyword most likely know that language well enough to read the results in that language. Having summary in the website’s native language is a very natural thing to do and an expected result for the users. Even if the search engine is facing NA market, since there are a large number of foreign people in NA, having some degree of International language support makes sense.
The importance of usability is elevated to a even higher level in the web 2.0 era. The center of computing is shifting from computers to human users. After many years’ of advancement, computers begin to fade into the background as commodity. The real power is organizing and combining exploding information generated by people and eventually used by people. However, people are "lazy", "impatient", and "greedy". Making the human users satisfied becomes more and more critical to the success of software and services providers. The business model and vehicle to deliver the software and services in Web 2.0 era is so unique that contributes in "spoiling" the users too. The barrier of entering and Web 2.0 industry is so low that a few good programmers with a good idea could make a very successful website. The services of huge number of those websites are very innovative, powerful, and, more importantly, free most of the time thanks to the online ads business model. The release and delivery of newer and nicer online services has so low impact to the users, with no hassle of installation, upgrading, or troubleshooting on the client side. With all these things together, the users end up being the spoiled king! They have so many choices and they are free. So they can switch to any better product without much difficulty. Now it’s time for the software and service providers to worry about the user experience their products bring to the customers.
One big resistance to achieving good usability is from the software developers. Most of them are passionate about technology and tackling challenging problems, while feeling bored about non-technical stuff. Being customer obsessed and having a mind set of building software for human instead for machines would be a very appreciated capability of an excellent software developer. The new ways of organizing emails in gmail, the search engine keyword spelling correction feature, and so on are all from developers who made this step ahead.
