Ease of Use

Lately, I've been making it a personal goal to study/research more on the latest GUI usability trends, in my continuing quest to build more and more intuitive UIs into the softwares that I work with.

I was down at business partner's office this week conducting training, getting their folks up-to-speed on AppConnector. At the end of the session, one of my "students" made a comment which I thought was a really nice compliment. She said "I really like [the fact] that [AppConnector Studio] is so easy to use".

Yes, AppConnector is simple to use, but this was not by accident. We really focused on the non-programmers as our typical user audience. Sure, there's been some mistakes made in the beginning, but when we started version 3.0, our mind set was that someone without any programming knowledge should be able able to pick up and use the product in a day or so, and they should be able to do it in a few simple steps. Creating an integration project should be a matter of configuring a bunch of component properties.

Although there's certainly room for the product to grow in terms of usability and functionality, the person's comment above showed us that we must be doing something right.