Was ist Usability?

Usability hängt vom User ab… Sozuasgen davon, was er „used to do“ ist.

Hier ein Vergleich von MacOS und Windows – und warum die User nicht kompatibel sind…

On the Macintosh, when you want to resize a window, you have to grab the bottom right hand corner to resize it. On Windows, you can resize from any edge. When Pete was helping Gena, he tried to widen a window by dragging the right edge. Frustratingly, the whole window moved, rather than resizing as he expected.

On Windows, when a message box pops up, you can tab to a button and hit the space bar to press that button. On the Mac, space doesn’t work. When Pete got alerts, he tried to dismiss them using the space bar, like he’s been doing subconsciously for the last six years.

[…]

Pete has also gotten into the habit of using Alt+F4 to close windows. On the Mac, this actually changes the volume of the speakers. At one point, Pete wanted to click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop, which was partially covered by another window. So he hit Alt+F4 to close the window and immediately double-clicked where the icon would have been. The Alt+F4 raised the volume on the computer and didn’t close the window, so his double click actually went to the Help button in the toolbar on the window which he wanted closed anyway, and that immediately started bringing up a help window, slowly, so now, he’s got two windows open which he has to close.