Designing Highly Useable Software

This appendix provides several good resources for designing software.

Groups and Organizations

Below are a few groups and organizations you might find helpful:

• Usability Professionals’ Association (http://www.upassoc.org/) One of the larger associations dealing with usability, this organization holds annual conferences, provides a network of people interested in usability, and includes two publications. The first is an online-only magazine called UPA Voice, and the other is a printed magazine called User Experience. (See UPA Voice and User Experience in “Newsletters and Magazines” in this appendix.) They also have several local chapters, which you can explore on their website.

• STC Usabilty (http://www.stcsig.org/usability/) This is a special interest group (SIG) of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), which is a professional organization of technical writers. This SIG includes a sprinkling of local chapters. While it might seem odd that technical writers would have a usability chapter, the reality in organizations is often that the technical writers are the ones who end up being the GUI experts, providing critiques to the usability of the software. Further, the STC has more than just technical writers as its members these days. Today, many engineers belong to the organization as well. The STC’s main site is http://www.stc.org. (See also Usability Interface, under “Newsletters and Magazines” in this Appendix.)

• ACM SIGCHI (http://www.acm.org/sigchi/) ACM SIGCHI is the Computer-Human Interaction special interest group for the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery).