The information technology industry is getting big and just in case you had forgotten, you are the user. Application development specialists and IT vendors of all shapes and sizes love to repeat the customers, customers, customers mantra until they are blue in the face, but many of the technologies we use are driven by corporate roadmaps as much as they are user requirements.
Although Microsoft has fought hard to bring Windows 8 to us and insisted that the “tile interface” (rather than the much beloved START button of old) is the way forward, users baulked and recoiled in their droves. Was Microsoft forgetting users and usability? Actually it wasn’t and if you give Windows 8 a chance it is actually a more pleasant experience all round.
Before we get to apps and usability -- think about the Windows ‘Metro’ tile-based homescreen. If you have been missing your START button to get to your favourite apps, try typing the name of that app or function straight into the keyboard without even pulling up the side search bar, or Charm bar as it is known.
Hit the Windows key on your keyboard to ensure you are home central and then type “Wo ….” (because you are looking for Microsoft Word right?) and guess what? You’ll get an automatic option to start all apps beginning with the letters W and O. In my case this is Word, WordPad, World of Tanks and World Time, which for me is a pleasing choice. Click what you need from there or just type “Word” in full and you’ll only be presented with Word itself and WordPad.
This is “usability” in action and if you can spell it correctly (no it really doesn’t have an e in it) then you’ll start to recognise those apps that work well for you and have been engineered and constructed with the users’ core requirements at their heart.
The reason we have quite so many apps right now is that as individuals we often define usability in different ways. I happen to find that neither Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or Jannetter have produced the perfect Twitter app client yet. As a serious Twitter user I need real usability with a whole range of functions, so I use all three.
Janetter is great for uploading pictures to Twitter as you can just drag them from the desktop, but Tweetdeck doesn’t allow you to do that. Tweetdeck is much better however at Direct Messaging (DM) and telling you who has followed you. You get the point? We need usability to suit our individual needs and this often means using more than on app designed for the same function.
Here’s another example. I happen to love gaming and have been trying to get to some sort of respectable level in the online shoot em up category. Despite trying my hand at popular game apps like Red Crucible 2 on the Apple App Store, these so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) seem to leave me knocked out within seconds of the virtual tournaments starting up. Maybe its my age or maybe it’s the kids who play these games just being so much more adept at the keyboard-mouse combo, but I always seem to get wiped out.
But that was until the arrival of Shadowgun: Deadzone of course. With a word of caution to keep younger kids away from this genre of game I have to heartily recommend it. It’s playable of Apple Mac and PC or Android and iPad and it’s superb. A basic .exe file download (or .dmg disk image file if you are on Mac) and a quick log in and you’re off. OK so if shoot em ups aren’t your style, try soccer games or motorbike challenges or whatever floats your boat (yes there are loads of sailing apps like Sailboat Champions or Port Royale out there too!) until you find something you like.
If you didn’t like Motorbike Lite, which is currently ranking high on the Apple Mac store, then try Motorbike for Desktop on Windows. The point is, keep trying apps until you find one that gives you the usability that YOU demand for the way YOU like to use your computer.
Usability also comes down to basic form and function too. If your smartphone is always running out of power then go to your favourite app store and search for a term like “Battery”. Chances are that you will get a power function app that will help you work out which of your mobile device’s apps are draining the most power at any one time and give you options to shut them down. The Windows Phone 8 store has two apps both (rather logically) just called Battery -- and this reinforces our central point yet again i.e. try them both out, they’re both free anyway and you will most likely find that you like the usability of one just a little more than the other.
Hopefully this provides some colour and clarity into why the various apps stores now claim to have so many hundreds of thousands of apps. Thousands of apps on its own sounds like a lot, hundreds of thousands seems crazy at first. Usability is the hardest function to crack for any software application developer and that is why most apps from enterprise applications to games all go through a constant augmentation and refinement cycle. So now, if you don’t like the app that you’re using right now, try another one just like, it might just be more usable.
— Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist who specializes in software applications, gadgets and games.
