Usability – designing for people

Many of the observations we make when conducting usability studies may seem painfully trivial when viewed in isolation.

In some cases, even one minor fault can have a hugely negative impact on a web site. In combination, even a small number of minor faults can result in a really poor user experience, lost customers, lost orders, competitors taking the lead.

Also consider how much attention to detail is given to the aesthetic qualities and graphic design of a good web site. Colours tweaked, pixels pushed, balance and spacing fine-tuned, copy scrutinised and re-edited.

Good coders also pay attention to how a site is constructed – page code needs to be clean and correct in order to ensure an accessible, search-visible, all-inclusive and maintainable result.

Detail takes time and costs money, and ensuring a good user experience with high levels of goal achievement is just as important. In fact, if you don’t get this right, all other efforts can be affectively wasted.

Small details are a seriously big deal when it comes to usability.

I have been looking for something like this for a while. The CodeIgniter MVC style framework helps to bring order out of (potential) chaos in PHP development.

There are of course numerous frameworks for PHP, right from monolithic bloaters like CakePHP, through to presentation layer frameworks like Smarty, which is not a full application framework, but does a lot more that a basic templating engine.

Frameworks help to give structure to your PHP applications, which speeds up development and makes code more consistent and maintainable. You also benefit from separation of application logic from presentation and data handling. Mixing HTML/XHTML with PHP is undoubtedly bad for anything other than the odd dynamic page or two.

The are many other benefits, including: database abstraction, a full-range of function libraries, improved security, presentation layer templating, clean search engine friendly URLs, and so on.

What makes CodeIgniter my framework of choice is the small footprint – lean and efficient, CodeIgniter minimises the extra layers of code that inevitably get introduced with a framework, so performance is good. It is also extensible, flexible and does not impose strict controls on how you organise your code.

Finally, CodeIgniter has really good documentation and as the friendly CI community often attest, it brings greater levels of enjoyment to the process of Web application development, and this can only be a further boost to your productivity and the quality of your work.