Software Usability

Software supports its users in conducting their tasks. This is independent of the type of users. A user can be a human or another software. If a software allows its users to conduct their tasks with effectiveness, efficiency, and (in case of humans) satisfaction, it has a good usability.

As an example, you can think of the different tools of an office suite. Such usually provide a tool for writing documents and another one for creating presentation slides. With both tools, you may create a poster. Therefore, they both support conducting the same task. When doing the layout of the contents of the poster, both tools provide different mechanisms for doing so. Where the tool for writing documents supports the usage of text columns and images anchored on the page, the presentation tool directly allows laying out the elements using appropriate boxes. For many users, using the second variant is much more efficient and satisfying. Therefore, the presentation tool has a better usability for creating posters with respect to the mentioned users. In addition, another tool that is directly designed for creating posters may provide an even better usability.

In software development processes, the users and their tasks should analysed to derive requirements for the software