Usability – Context, framework, definition, design and evaluation

For many users the informatics system is essentially the terminal or workstation which they are using, and that is the central computer as they see it. But only too often these users are seen as “end-users” by designers – and this name may well betray an attitude which causes some of the bad design for users and failures in usability. Designers must see the user as the centre of the computer system instead of as a mere peripheral. This simple concept, easy to state but harder to achieve, is often expounded by ergonomists and human factors specialists. It has been emphasised by Nicholls (1979): In spite of changes in the nature of computing, remnants of old thinking remain with us. In former days, when the CPU was at the heart of a system, designers naturally talked of “terminals” and “peripherals”. I suspect it was in this period that people began to use the term “end user”. The unconscious symbolism is both a symptom and a cause; the “end” user at the “terminal” was often the last person to be considered in the design of the system. It is important to develop a new view of computing systems, and to look at the user in a different light … taking this view of computing, the centre of a system is the user.