About

Usability Friction is the blog of Ashley Towers. It is about how to improve the design of physical products and software user interfaces. The name comes from a concept in interface design where it is a measure of how much the 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 makes it more obvious what the blog is about).

Usability is something I’m passionate about. Badly designed products just annoy me. If I were to draw a line in the sand and say “this is when I started caring about usability” it would be when I bought my first Mac, after years of being a Windows die hard (it was a PowerBook G4). I fell in love with the software and the hardware, Mac OS X just gets out of the way and lets you get on with your work and the hardware is just unbeatable – there are dozens of little touches that convince you that someone has spent a lot of time thinking about how the product can be the best it can be.

At the time when this happened I was working as a software engineer, so I started reading around the subject and incorporating it into my daily work. A year or so later I took a job in Local Government and left the IT profession. Wow, what an eye opener that was! Working with technical people 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’s just not of interest to them; but it drove home with a vengeance 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. My interest in usability became a passion.

Since then, I’ve returned to the IT industry. Now, I want to share what I have learned and help people recognise how they can improve their designs – it doesn’t much time to produce something usable and the effort is always well worth it. Users appreciate well designed products, they recommend them to their friends and family. Any effort spent is paid back many times over in loyalty, increased sales and free advertising!