Important Facts About Usability

Usability is not about ugly design
There tends to be a general sentiment that usable websites are ugly.  This is probably spawned from the time in which Flash was used as a primary method of website presentation.  With that, usability specialists began to lash out against the use of such frivolous technology and started concocting sites which had very little complexity, stripping a site of all unnecessary colors.  However, thanks to Jakob Nielsen, today, Flash is not used as frivolously as it once was.  And, therefore, the backlash of ugly design rescinded.

Usability makes sense
Regardless of how cool your site looks or how much good information is on it, if a user cannot find the information, that information does not exist. Therefore, it is crucial that your site supports visitors who are foraging for information.  Something that is true about all online users is that they go on websites with a purpose in mind.  More often than not, they are looking for some type of information.

Usability should not be an afterthought
Usability should be put at the forefront of any website re-development initiative.  It is more costly to include your users at the end of a redesign than it is at the beginning.  Here is a real life story about how much it could cost you if you factor in your users too late:

"Savings from earlier vs. later changes: Changes cost less when made earlier in the development life cycle.  Twenty changes in a project, at 32 hours per change and [a minimal] hourly rate of $35, would cost $22,400.  Reducing this to 8 hours per change would reduce the cost to $5,600.  Savings = $16,800" (Human Factors International, 2001).

"A financial services company had to scrap an application it had developed, when, shortly before implementation, developers doing a User Acceptance test found a fatal flaw in their assumptions about how data would be entered.  By this time, it was too late to change the underlying structure, and the application never implemented" (Dray, 1995).