Usability in your business: making the links

Working every day with web usability and accessibility issues, and with other digital communications media such as interactive television and mobile telecoms, it can be easy for us to forget that for many people "web usability" is an alien discipline.  After all, the World Wide Web is less than 10 years old, and mobile telephones have really only become ubiquitous in the last seven or eight years.  Awareness of the need for usable design is much newer than that.

Every now and then, we will be talking to someone from another industry - explaining what we do - and they suddenly say "Aha!  I know what that is.  We've been doing it for years; we call it ......."

This little section of our website - "Usability in your business" is dedicated to capturing those "Aha!" moments, and drawing the links and parallels between our work as usability professionals and the processes and language of other industries or business disciplines.  Our first link is to "Market Research".  Please if you find it helpful, or indeed if you have had any of your own "Aha!" moments in browsing this website that you would be willing to share.

Hopefully, by explaining what we do in familiar terms, this will help some people get a handle on what "usability" is all about.  It may also remind us to keep our communication "useable" by talking our clients' language rather than our own....  

"Aha!"

 
© The Usability Company 2005