“Focus on usability and everything else will follow.”
That is a key philosophy behind Panopticon's visual analysis and monitoring software. The marriage of aesthetics, interaction and design creates software that help provide users and managers with true insight into their business problems — quickly and intuitively — saving them valuable time and helping them make informed decisions in a timely manner. We are constantly striving to improve and refine our visualizations. Our design team works closely with our users and with visualization experts from around the world to capture new requirements and ideas and to implement them in our software.
How Can Information Visualization Tools Make
Enterprise Software Systems More Usable?
Usability measures the quality of a user's experience when interacting with a system — whether it's a website, a software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device. In general, usability refers to how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals and how satisfied they are with that process. Usability, as defined by Joseph Dumas and Janice Redish, authors the A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, means that people who use the product can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their tasks. Usability may also consider such factors as cost-effectiveness and usefulness.
It is important to realize that usability is not a single, one-dimensional property of a user interface. Usability is a combination of factors including:
- Easy to Learn. How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
- Efficiency. Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
- Memorable. If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything?
- Low Error Frequency and Severity. How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
- Satisfaction. How much does the user like using the system?
The International Standards Organization (ISO) has even defined usability and human-centered design as follows:
"[Usability refers to] the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of user." ISO 9241-11
"Human-centered design is characterized by: the active involvement of users and a clear understanding of user and task requirements; an appropriate allocation of function between users and technology; the iteration of design solutions; multi-disciplinary design." ISO 13407
Our design team follows these principles and works very hard to develop products — including our SDK, our enterprise systems, and our Windows desktop products — that are easy to understand and use and require very little or no training.
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