Planning for Usability
Apress eBooks · 2006
Usability planning is one of the most valuable tools for a project. This is where the important decisions are made regarding what the user experience will be and how it can be finetuned into a veritable racehorse of usability and efficiency. In the real world, you might often find that usability planning is reduced (or even worse, omitted) from a project due to time constraints or unexpected shifts in the functional specifications of an application. When it comes down to it, things first must function before they can function well, and sometimes there’s only time given for things to just function! That’s why we believe it’s critical to plan for usability from the outset of the project. Needless to say, the revising of an application never really ends, which is why we’re already on the eighth version of Macromedia Flash! No application can ever be perfect. The goals of usability planning are to get as close as you can. In our next chapter, we will put together all of the solutions in Part 2 to create one integrated solution! Let’s see how well we planned for creating that perfectly usable application.