This computer led me to start being interested in how people use computers.

Most of the technology challenges my family faced have been them struggling with usability issues.  Later when I was paid to write programs I wanted to make software easy to use, because I wanted people to use the software. When I started Deckchair.com with Bob Geldof our whole ethos was to make booking flights less frustrating, and simpler. I think we succeeded on the whole. Before the Internet flight booking engines, it took months for somebody to learn how to book a flight using a computer. When online bookings became available consumers where able to do it themselves without training. How many people still use a Travel Agent now?

Many Usability experts blame the programmer for the Usability Challenge. If you read Alan Coopers book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum you will find a rant in how programmers are to blame. He uses a very narrow stereotype of the programmer to illustrate his argument. The second issue I have with Coopers blame game, is that he does not acknowledge that most of the innovation in usability has actually come from programmers. Jef Raskin and the apple Mac, Douglas Engelbart and the GUI, the mouse, and hypertext. Or even more recent movements like Web 2.0 the innovations have mainly been led from the programming field.

Most programmers I have worked with are as frustrated by usability as much as anybody else, maybe even more so because they have to use computers all the time, and as Paul Graham, the creator of the first web based application said :-

Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code. Or more precisely, when they release more code. Programmers like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway.

I believe that we can start solving the challenge of Usability once everybody starts understanding what the issues are. Very few people design systems not to be usable. If there is an usability issue, it is there because the programmer or designer overlooked something, or did not expect the user to behave in that way, or did not realise the importance of the issue, and lastly did not understand what the user did not understand.

We need more ways to discover how people behave using computers, and then communicate that back to the designers and programmers. That is why I co-started Webnographer to help the designers and programmers understand how people use the software that they have created.

It boils down to what Stuart Card said “All designs are predictions, all predictions fail.”