About

Hi, welcome to my blog – Usability Friction! My name is Ashley Towers and I’m a Development/Project Manager based in Sheffield, UK. This blog is about how to improve the design of physical products and software user interfaces. The name comes from the measurement of how much an interface “gets in the way” and slows you down. For example, if you get a load of unnecessary confirmation boxes – these increase the friction of the interface and slow the progress of what you trying to do (strictly speaking, the term is “interface friction” but I think usability friction is a better name for a blog!).

Usability is something I’m passionate about. Badly designed products just annoy me. There’s no excuse! Your customer’s experience should be one of the most important things you focus on. A huge percentage of problems could be easily resolved – sometimes the solution would cost less than repeating the existing bad design! Improving your offerings usability increases customer satisfaction, makes them more likely to recommend your products and cuts down your support calls.

The majority of my career has been in software development; starting as a developer then working my way up (some might say down!) to development and project management. However, I spent a number of years working outside of IT as Project Office Manager for Sheffield City Council. Starting in this job was certainly an eye opener – when you are working in a technical environment every day you just assume everyone knows about computers – but in the real world it’s amazing how basic some people’s grasp of IT is! There isn’t anything wrong with this – my new colleagues were all intelligent people – IT is just not of interest to them – it’s a means to an end; but it drove home how important it is to consider the design of products and software interfaces so that people can use them and not be made to feel stupid. I realised usability isn’t just desirable – it’s essential!

So that’s what I try and do here – try and explain some of the principles of good design; give examples of good and bad design (then say *why* they are good or bad!) and write tutorials on how you can apply these to your products. And just do my best to try and make the world a little less frustrating!