not bad everyone, the reason I asked is some people assumed the wrong meaning, and some posted questions here about the wrong things.
I think perhaps it is mostly people that did not respond that needed the most help.
etech-peter has made an important distiction between
if it works and how easy it is to use. It's the difference between a tool's capacity to do a job and its capacity to be employed. Sure a video recorder can record your favourite show while your're away on holiday, but can you program it to do so?
Both to conceive and evaluate your design you must know who the user is (users are). Simply because different people will find some things easier than others. (And can your gran program the video recorder?)
Assuming you don't know
exactly who will be using your product over its life-time, generally you group all the people that might use it into segments to reprasent a cross-section of your user-base / target market. This approximation avoids trying to think about potentially millions of users while keeping a good range of target users in mind.
If we look in Wikipedia we see that also you have to consider what the user might want to do with your product, and design/evaluate for many different user-segments using each (or a relevant selection) of the expected (sensible or intended) uses.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcomics
Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object's perceived efficiency or elegance.
In human-computer interaction and computer science, usability usually refers to the elegance and clarity with which the user interface of a computer program or a web site is designed. The term is also used often in the context of products like consumer electronics, or in the areas of communication, and knowledge transfer objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help). It can also refer to the efficient design of a mechanical objects such as a door handle or a hammer.
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Accessability and usability are related, they are both part of erganomics (the relationship between user and tool). Accessibility could be called the most basic form of usability, but usually in web sites it refers to the underlying code not the interface itself - so I prefer to think of it as a pre-requisite to usability.
Anyway hopefully this will help some people, although I doubt the worst will be here reading it anyway! (By the worst I mean people who post irrelevant stuff on this part of the forum).