Usability Hits Mainstream
Usability has come a long way since 1983 (the year I was born and the year this photo of Bill Gates was taken). The first Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference was held in 1982 and some of the major contributions to the field were published a decade later (e.g. Nielsen’s Usability Engineering and Dumas’s A Practical Guide to Usability Testing). For more on the birth of usability, see an earlier post.
This week is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and Bill Gates delivered his last CES keynote. He will step down to a part-time role at Microsoft in July (while maintaining the chairman title). When asked about the difference between Apple’s approach and Microsoft’s approach to product releases, Gates points to usability. Gates explains that Microsoft has a large number of researchers and there is a “renaissance of usability and prototyping” led by people like Bill Buxton (author of Sketching User Experiences). Gates notes the need to combine usability with the deep computer science work that Microsoft is good at. He claims success in usability with Office 2007 and XBox. He applauds Apple for focusing in on specific products and polishing them. See the full interview at Gizmodo.
If Bill Gates recognizing usability is not enough for you, then take a look at US News and World Report’s Top 31 Careers. The list includes “Usability/user experience specialist.”
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