Software Usability: Overcoming the Barriers: Opening Statement

by Carolyn Snyder

Before I became a usability consultant, I spent the first 10 years of my career developing hard-to-use software. Of course, I didn't know at the time that's what I was doing. As a software engineer and then project manager for a building controls company, I worked hard with my teams to deliver applications that we believed facilities managers would find useful. But outside of a couple of beta site visits, few of us felt any connection with the people our software was supposed to benefit. We assumed, in an innocent Field of Dreams kind of way, that the existence of a tool was sufficient proof of its utility. If we built it, customers would come.