Good design it seems can come from one of two places, brilliance or planning. Every generation has its talented designers, but they are few and generally too busy to help the rest of figure out our own problems. Good design doesn’t have to come from a genius. It can come from your users too.

I’ve been evangelizing about this at my company since before I even new what usability was. I saw people struggling with parts of the software we were developing and I felt for them. I joined the organization as a trainer and had seen people struggle with using off-the-shelf software. It seemed there was little I could do about improving it, but darn it, on tools we were developing, there must be an opportunity to influence how it was being built.

I’m sure my colleagues found me annoying (they almost said as much) with constantly asking questions along the lines of  “Why do it we do it this way?” “People aren’t getting this” , but over time I’ve begun to have some influence over them on how our applications are built. I didn’t have much luck though until I began to talk more formally with our users. It’s not like I had some sort of questionnaire, I just really began asking them serious questions about what they liked and didn’t like about using the tools we were building for them. Reporting back their responses, I found, added credibility to what I was saying and some validation for my critiques. Slowly, people (management and developers) began to listen.

I’ve learned that users hold one of the keys to building usable applications. For the most part, they are eager to contribute to the development process; if only you ask. Informally, I’d say about 90% of the people I ask to help evaluate new tools we are developing, say “Yes”. Sometimes it’s very formal with questionnaires and structured testing, other times it’s looser with just simple questions like “What do you think of this?” or “Is this something you’d use?”

The key action step is to ask. If you don’t ask for feedback from the outside, the only feedback you’ll get is from the inside. Certainly you need that internal feedback, but insiders aren’t the only ones using the tool. Sometimes they never use it. Your users, meaning the people who actually use the application, are the ones you need to be talking to.

Older, but not dated, talk by Seth Grodin about broken things and the reasons why. Usability issues are all around us.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/this-is-broken.html

I often hear how “young people” (around 18-35) are very comfortable and savvy using technology. In my experience I haven’t seen much difference between the learning needs of young adults and older adults.  Yes, younger people are more comfortable with technology as general rule, but that doesn’t make them more skilled at using it and they have the same struggles as anyone else.  There are a couple of key differences I’ve found between a younger and older audience:

Experience: Many older workers have seen the impact of technology in their work lives evolve from no-impact to major impact. They remember the “dark days” of paper, typewriters, punch cards, terminal screens, arcane commands, hand-coding and other time-consuming and uninteresting tasks that were once required to create documents, enter data, perform calculations, create applications or issue commands. Younger workers weren’t around during that period and their expectations for easy to use/learn, intuitive applications is much higher and their lack of experience can mean additional training time explaining concepts like database relationships, web server/browser behaviors or security issues.

Attitude: Older workers (really, older people in general) tend to be more patient and appreciative of the efficiency opportunities provided by new technologies and are often more willing to expend the effort to learn the new tool. Younger workers tend to be less patient with learning complicated new technologies; however because of this they can be strong advocates for pushing an organization to adopt easier to use and more sophisticated tools and solid allies when you are pushing for real change. If you market the benefits of the tool correctly to older works, they can be just as passionate a champion.

There’s no question it would be awesome to have ERP or HRMS applications use Ipad, Android or Xbox type interfaces or be able to talk to them like HAL or the computers in Minority Report, but those kinds of advancements are still some distance in the future. In the meantime, these sorts of tools are going to be complex and require both usability improvements and training resources to maximize their potential in the hands of all end users, whether old or young.

Adult learning needs are essentially the same, no matter the age. There are different challenges for younger vs. older, but by following the fundamentals of show, tell and do you can bring both groups up to speed on the applications you want to implement.