Usability and SDLC
October 23, 2006
Merging usability methods and processes have often been re-occuring talk. Lots of businesses in India and abroad have tried this and failed with mediocre results. The truth is merging Usability with Software development lifecycles often endup in creation of software that is an ‘in between piece’ between usable software and functional ones.
The best amount of usability that actually ends up in these projects are best practises. Just the sheer amount of work and time constraints involved end up in creation of large sets of products with little or no attention they set out to offer.
The right way and the best way is to,
- Keep them seperate,
Design is most often a creative process. We often make the mistake that rapid inclusion of too many processes and scalling up resources gives us the result. The fact is it doesn’t. Some activities are effective only when done at the begining and usability is just one of them - Spend a generous amount of time before actual development,
The time is money approach only leads to bigger problems or non-recovery of investment. What’s the point of the latest software that can’t be usable and whats the point of spending too less a time when deciding what should be done - Test after the projects
Guidelines and principles work well, but just like statistics can be used in the most plausible of ways. Unless you test them against the real users you may have a problem in the big idea and implementation giving true results at the end of deployment.
October 24, 2006 at 5:48 am
I agree with you to a certain point. I believe the UCD process can be laid over the development lifecycle and still work without overloading the process pool. But I know from experience that some developments are hard to keep on track and end up being what you have described as “an ‘in between piece’ between usable software and functional ones.”
I think we need a revolution into the development lifecycle and as applying usability is still very young in respect to the software development process we still need to find the best ways to implement it. After all, we need to continue to keep advancing in how we do our processes, especially in usability.