Designing Highly Useable Software

Learn What Usability Really Is, Why to Strive for It, and How to Achieve It "Highly useable" software is easy to use. It does what you expect it to. And it does it well. It's not easy to build but as this book demonstrates, it's well worth the effort. Highly useable software is highly successful software—and everyone wins. Inside, an accomplished programmer who has made usability his business systematically explores the world of programming, showing you how every aspect of the work is implicated in the usability of the final product. This is not just an "issues" book, however, but systematic, real-world instructions for developing applications that are better in every way. As you'll learn, there's no such thing as "intuitive" software. Instead, there are just the factors that make it highly useable: simplicity, consistency, the recognition of accepted conventions, and the foregrounding of the user's perspective. With these principles under your belt, you'll quickly discover dozens of ways to make your applications more useable: Making windows and dialog boxes easy to comprehend and use Designing software that is time- and resource-efficient Making your software easy to navigate Reducing the complexity of reports and other presentations of data Understanding how the wrong programming decisions can limit usability Ensuring smooth starts and stops Capitalizing on the usability advantages of object-oriented programming Understanding how usability affects your product's financial success Using the testing process to improve usability Promoting usability in training, installation, and online help Making management decisions that will benefit software usability Some chapters are written primarily for programmers, one primarily for managers. Most are for everyone, and all are filled with illuminating, usually amusing examples drawn from both inside and outside the technical world. A helpful appendix provides information on standards, usability groups, and sources for more information.

In the quest for quality, software developers have long focused on improving the internal architecture of their products. Larry L. Constantine--who originally created structured design to effect such improvement--now joins with well-known consultant Lucy A. D. Lockwood to turn the focus of software development to the external architecture. In this book, they present the models and methods of a revolutionary approach to software that will help programmers deliver more usable software--software that will enable users to accomplish their tasks with greater ease and efficiency. Recognizing usability as the key to successful software, Constantine and Lockwood provide concrete tools and techniques that programmers can employ to meet that end. Much more than just another set of rules for good user-interface design, this book guides readers through a systematic software development process. This process, called usage-centered design, weaves together two major threads in software development methods: use cases (also used with UML) and essential modeling. With numerous examples and case studies of both conventional and specialized software applications, the authors illustrate what has been shown in practice to work and what has proved to be of greatest practical value. Highlights Presents a streamlined process for developing highly usable software Describes practical methods and models successfully implemented in industry Complements modern development practices, including the Unified Process and other object-oriented software engineering approaches

Discover how to create software products your customers will love! In today's competitive software market, to attract and retain users and customers, software products and websites need attractive, eye-catching interfaces, and they must provide frustration-free user experiences. Whether you're designing a mobile, tablet, desktop, or web-based software application, Designing Usable Apps will teach you the principles you need to know and the tried-and-tested techniques you'll want to use to make your product easy to learn and fun to use. Designing Usable Apps is a compact, practical guide to the key ideas, principles, and practices of User Experience design and usability evaluation. Read this book, and you will: * Discover the fundamental psychological principles behind how people use computing devices and software * Learn techniques for discovering the needs and characteristics of your users * Become familiar with the recommended techniques and project processes, both for agile and traditional teams, that will help ensure usability is built in to your product throughout the software development lifecycle * Understand techniques for creating effective prototypes and lightweight software design specifications * Grasp the key processes and techniques for evaluating and testing the usability of software designs, prototypes, and products * Recognize what problems cause user frustration and dissatisfaction, so you can identify and correct usability issues

Strategies for building large systems that can be easily adapted for new situations with only minor programming modifications. Time pressures encourage programmers to write code that works well for a narrow purpose, with no room to grow. But the best systems are evolvable; they can be adapted for new situations by adding code, rather than changing the existing code. The authors describe techniques they have found effective--over their combined 100-plus years of programming experience--that will help programmers avoid programming themselves into corners. The authors explore ways to enhance flexibility by: Organizing systems using combinators to compose mix-and-match parts, ranging from small functions to whole arithmetics, with standardized interfaces Augmenting data with independent annotation layers, such as units of measurement or provenance Combining independent pieces of partial information using unification or propagation Separating control structure from problem domain with domain models, rule systems and pattern matching, propagation, and dependency-directed backtracking Extending the programming language, using dynamically extensible evaluators

Poorly designed software is hard to use, difficult to upgrade and maintain, and incurs high costs for training and downtime. According to the Sustainable Computer Consortium, defective software costs U.S. companies over USD200 billion annually. The graphical user interface (GUI) is the part of software that forms the bulk of the user's experience; consequently, Bad GUI design produces frustration and lost productivity. User-oriented GUI design creates software products that make computers easy to learn use and the end users highly productive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, system software engineering and application software engineering are two of the ten fastest growing occupations in the US.

Be Right at Home in the World's Most Powerful Web Development Environment For large-scale web application development, Visual Studio 2005 is the most capable product around. This book shows team members and leaders how to use its power in several key dimensions. You'll master dozens of built-in features for creating a large, high-performance website based on ASP.NET 2.0. You'll work seamlessly with dynamic data, both reading from and writing to databases. And throughout, you'll learn how Visual Studio 2005 supports a more efficient group process in terms of design, development, and deployment. And everything is brought together with the enterprise-scale example, "ABC Incorporated," that runs throughout the book. This is a book no web developer, and no web-dependent organization, should be without. Coverage Includes Reaping the benefits of master pages and themes Generating site maps and other navigational aids automatically Building a shopping cart application for your website Adding search functionality to your website Creating a flexible user environment using Webpart technology Increasing application performance using client-side and server-side scripting technologies Giving users the ability to change the website's theme to meet specific needs Using components and controls to add special effects and user customization Improving team efficiency using modern development and design techniques Monitoring and responding to usage statistics Combining technologies to get the best possible results from large applications Making your site accessible to everyone Master Standards-Based Web Development Techniques New to Visual Studio 2005 Discover How Visual Studio 2005 Solves Team Development Issues, Such as Source Code Control and Application Design Simplify Database Application Development without Compromising Security or Reliability

​Information Systems (IS) as a discipline draws on diverse areas including, technology, organisational theory, management and social science. The field is recognized as very broad and encompassing many themes and areas. However, the development of artefacts, or information systems development (ISD), in the broadest sense, is a central concern of the discipline. Significantly, ISD impacts on the organisational and societal contexts through the use of the artefacts constructed by the development. Today, that impact also needs to be evaluated in terms of its effects on the environment. Sustainable, or "green," IT is a catch-all term used to describe the development, manufacture, management, use and disposal of ICT in a way that minimizes damage to the environment. As a result, the term has many different meanings, depending on the role assumed in the life span of the ICT artefact. The theme of the proposed work is to critically examine the whole range of issues around ISD from the perspective of sustainability. Sustainable IT is an emerging theme in academic research and industry practice in response to an individual concern for the environment and the embryonic regulatory environments being enacted globally to address the environmental impact of ICT. In this work we intend to bring together in one volume the diverse research around the development of sustainable IS.