Cre8asite Forums, where I’m a moderator, is a community which always puts usability at the top of the totem pole. Although perhaps principally known as a search engine marketing resource, the members of the forum consistently take usability into consideration whenever possible.
This has popped up a couple times recently — first, Kim Krause Berg, the owner/founder of Cre8asite and sole proprietor of the usability consultancy The Usability Effect, was asked about her focus on usability by Mike McDonald of WebProNews at the end of Search Engine Strategies New York. It’s a nice little interview (10 minutes), and well worth a listen.
The second occurrence is in a posting from Elizabeth Able at Cre8asite Forums. It’s short, sweet and to the point: usability has to come to the top as the “glue that keeps it real.” It’s a question of making a website something useful. Quick success can be mechanically achieved, perhaps: but long term success requires a solution which, in some way, makes life easier.
Just wanted to draw a little attention to those items and the ideas contained therein.
Usability. It’s what’s for dinner. 😉
Mike Cherim
It is pretty important. A site is nothing if not usable. It won’t even be properly accessible to the enabled let alone the disabled if it fails on the usability level. To quote a the title of a recent article I churned out: Usability is Design.