Usability is a quality many of us are familiar with, but can't put our finger on. Usability is very important to us, every day, however we often don't realise it. Usability is the property of ease-of-use and intuitiveness which stops us from pulling our hair out by the roots everytime we turn on our computers or use our VCRs¹. Usability is a subject which has grown over many years, now being considered a vital point of good design. Disciples come from many different walks of life; information architects, graphical designers, software designers, product designers, editors , psychologists and many more. Ultimately, usability is something important to everybody, which makes it important for everyone wanting to design something too.

The roots of usability lie in learning theories and behavioural psychology. It was here that the first studies were made into the way people interact with their environment.

Before the early 90's, usability remained an abstract, academic subject confined to the research labs of the largest software and hardware companies. It was expensive and time consuming to perform usability studies, and the results were often crude and unhelpful. Newly 'finished' products were shipped to a laboratory where a bewildering array of tests were performed. The results were then written up into an impressive book, bound and promptly discarded into an archive box².

In 1990, Jakob Nielsen, devised a set of heuristics³ for testing the usability of products with a minimal outlay in time and money.