Usability is very important when creating software. In the nineties there were a few million internet users, and most of those people were geeks. Today there are more than a billion internet users and most of these people don’t have a technical background. Unless you’re making applications for fun, games or applications replacing intimacy, most people don’t want to use software, how great it may be.

An example may be that when someone buys a lottery ticket, that person is not buying a piece of paper. He’s buying hope. If someone is buying toilet paper, he’s not buying just paper because it looks nice or stands well between the furniture. That person is buying hygiene. This is the same with software. People aren’t using software because it’s just cool. Most people don’t want to use software but they want to have used software. It’s a big difference. With software they want a solution to their problem. And those people also want the software to “just work”. When you go to technical conferences today, you may or may not be dazzled by new possibilities. With some new technologies for .Net for example you can create very beautiful interfaces with 3D effects and crazy colors. But do you need them?

An example: Google earth has a very cool feature when you look for a location it zooms in to the earth. The first time you might think this is so cool to see. But the 10th time you’ll be thinking, hurry up now, it’s taking 20 seconds to finish it’s zooming in. On the other hand, if someone in a power plant can graphically see the level of some device in his central with 3D images and video he’ll be helped a lot, because it’s easier to look at 3D moving images than just looking at numbers.

Use your ideas for good and not evil. These ideas’ come from David Platt, a speaker at the Devdays in Amsterdam and .Net professor. The GLOWE core team of course completely agrees that usability is important for end users and we even take it a step further. We also believe solutions should be easy, especially for mobile, because today, creating solutions for mobile isn’t always as easy as it should be.

A part of our GLOWE mission is to enable people to easily create personal and relevant widgets that can be used anywhere. Usability is very important for the end user, but we also believe this usability should also exist in more than 1 level, at the level of the end user, but also with the person creating the widget.