Web Application Usability

Although this blog is principally about ASP.NET and web application development, I thought I'd drop in a link to an interesting article over on Simple Talk. It's about how to design a software tool. A large portion of what Stephen discusses is to do with user interaction, which is, in my view, absolutely critical to web based applications. The process we use for application design, and for web application design is fundamentally the same here at Red Gate, and this article gives a few insights into the way we do it.

Linking a couple of different concepts together, we are in the process of reviewing the usability of Simple Talk itself. One of the things we've been highlighting is the fact that there is a lot of content available on the site, and that we need to help people get access to it much more easily, something that they can't necessarily do particularly well at the moment.

We get a high number of visits to recently published articles such as the Geek of the Week column (for example this week featuring an interview with Linus Torvalds), but people seem to find it hard to access older content. We're going to be looking at this in some depth in the coming weeks, so if you're a Simple Talk reader and have got any particular requests or suggestions, now is the time to get them in, and we will try and do something about them.