I firmly believe technology should be accessible and usable by all and it is my life goal to fulfill this dream.
Quite often, developers and engineers never get to actually see their creations in use by their target audience. When they do, it is often a painful experience. A good example of this would be the first time I watched somebody use my website - Photographica.org. I cringed as the person failed to find what I thought was an obvious place to put the upload link. I winced as they couldn't figure out something that was second nature to me, the way the system catalogs its images. Worse, they were aghast that they needed to learn HTML just to make a simple post.
There are thousands of other websites and software programs that suffer the same fate as my website. All of these websites are created with little to no thought given to the actual people who will use them. Developers happily churn out pages and pages of code, creating designs that make sense to the developer, but make none to the user. The developers then unleash their work onto the public, only to watch it fail miserably as nobody can figure out how to use it.
But there is a solution. By involving the very people whom will use our software from the outset, and by creating a design based on their feedback, we can arrive at usable products. Products where users are involved throughout the development process are far more usable then those that don't. When users are involved, the designers get out of the mindset where they design for themselves. The designers become surprised when they learn a user might see a task from a different light. As the product is built, the designs are constantly tested on real users to determine if they work. Often they don't, and the design is reevaluated usually with a few minor tweaks. Through this process, known as the iterative design process, we can arrive at usable software.
In my lifetime I have witnessed computers go from drab, heavy boxes with pale green screens to small, well designed tools with unimaginable power. My cell phone has more computing power then the first computer I used. While these devices have grown to unimaginable powers, only recently have we begun to tap the true power of these devices--Connecting people. Only by practicing quality, user centered design can we ever hope to live in a truly wired world.
-- Cory R. King