Moving Forward

Now we, as software engineers, designers, programmers, or whatever we call ourselves, need to start thinking about ways to build software that interacts with the Internet—both through wireless and more traditional methods—while maintaining high usability. Is it possible? Yes. We just have some work to do. This field is young, with lots of new software on the horizon, and now is the time to start thinking about usability, before the software is released and before the ideas are even generated. And if you follow all the rules and suggestions that I laid out in this somewhat short chapter, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.

This wraps up Part I of the book, “Keeping It Simple”! I’ve gone through a lot of issues dealing with the presentation of your software: the GUI, the reports, the web interface, and so on. The next chapter starts Part II, “The Lonely Engineer,” where I talk about the programming side of usability. Usability extends far beyond just the obvious visual elements of a program. I start everything out with Chapter 8, “Under the Hood,” where I talk about a miscellany of topics such as dealing with dynamic memory allocation. When done correctly, such programming practices as I describe shortly will greatly improve the usability of your software.