Joanna Bawa – författare

Reviews of the ''Politics of Usability'' by the same editors:"Designing quality web sites or easy-to-use software is simple: just employ established usability engineering methods. The only hard part is getting people to actually do so instead of basing the design on their own intuition. Luckily, the authors in this book know all the devious tricks that are necessary to get development organizations to do the right thing. Follow their advice and the usability of your products will double."Dr Jakob Nielsen, Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, Author of ''Usability Engineering''"This well written book shows how to overcome many of the problems of putting research into the theories, methods and techniques of human computer interaction to work in commercial systems projects."Dave Clarke, Consultant, Visualize Software - Computer Bulletin, September 1998A follow-up to the successful ''Politics of Usability'' this book shows how to apply HCI expertise in the pressured environment of a modern organisation. Quite apart from the need to provide a good usability service cheaply and efficiently, most HCI practitioners also have to deal with day-to-day concerns such as funding, budgets, project and people management, teamwork, communication and promoting an HCI ethos within the company. How to achieve this and still find new ways to make modern technology more usable is the central message of this book.The Usability Business offers a unique insight into usability issues. The book deals with real work situations focussing on practical, workable approaches to professional responsibilities.

Why This Book, Why Now? It is now widely recognized that in the development of IT systems, the technology­ driven focus of the past has been eclipsed by a concern for user satisfaction and user productivity. It is well known that usability engineering helps make systems easier to use and more relevant to business needs. The benefits of producing usable computer systems have been proven in careful dollar or pound calculations and any computer user who has interacted with a system designed for usability will enthuse about the benefits and refuse to go back to the bad old days. More and more organizations are starting to take usability seriously. Along with Microsoft and Apple and other IT organizations, we now find banks, insur­ ance companies, multi-national pharmaceuticals and many other non-IT corpora­ tions starting to "do something about usability". It seems as if there is plenty of material explaining how to do it. HCI (Human Computer Interaction - or CHI, Computer Human Interaction in the USA) has been studied in academia for several years and there are a range of books on usability engineering for practi­ tioners from systems engineering and user interface design to usability evaluation. However, as many practitioners have found, although you do need to understand the theories and be familiar with the techniques, applying them in a commercial context is not a straightforward matter.