Understanding Usability
I came across a good article on usability over at OSNews. Although it seems to be written with open-source or Linux developers in mind, the points he makes are pretty general and applicable to the development of anything that people *use*, particularly software.
Usability is not about selecting the fanciest Theme from kde-look.org, it’s not about ‘Reading the F*** Manual’, it’s not about having all application share the same looks, it’s not about nice front-ends to obscure command line programs, it’s not about newbie-friendliness, it’s not about apt-get install foobar and it’s not about setup.exe.
Understanding Usability by Richard Spindler.