usability
went this evening to an interesting meeting about usability in practice at two large companies . Was very interresting to hear that at both companies they are dealing with the same problems concerning developing new ‘human-machine-interaction-applications’, software and websites. It happens almost everywhere that developing and programming is mainly done from the focus of the techies. In most organisations, there are 2 interaction designers or usability consultants on 100 programmers. Result: usabilty is often not an issue, applications will be made according to the user-experiences of the techy-programmers. Knowing that and hearing it again, it makes me aware of the things that have to be changed in our organisation.

Wanna know more about usability? have a look at sigchi.nl (special interest group for computer hunman interaction) or the international acm.org (association for computing machinery) website.