Design for usability

To design for usability is to follow general guidelines where available. Recognizing that users will draw on past experiences, the designer needs to build on familiar conventions for usability—orienting users, making things easy, and keeping things consistent. In the world of web-based communication, the traditional conventions for usability remain the starting point for design even when design goes beyond the familiar. In designing a wiki to support deep collaboration, Fernheimer and her team struggled to build a design that would capitalize on familiar conventions for editing while also encouraging users to engage in unfamiliar collaborative practices.