Why usability of an application is important?

Testing the user friendliness of an application is called Usability testing.

Let us start with an example such that we have two applications A & B which are different but doing the same job. In this, we see which one is user friendly

Given below are some of the parameters we look into for testing. In this most of them are not measurable,

1)Speed

2)Help

3)Navigation should be simple

4)Compatibility

5)Look & feel

6)Features

7)Location of components

One important parameter other than the above said parameters is “Effort needed to learn the application”. 

Suppose in the example, we understand the software A in 2 hrs, but we take 4 hrs to understand B. Let us see different cases here,

since we understand A in 2 hrs, it becomes user friendly compared to B

suppose look & feel is not good for A. In this case though, we understand A in 2 hrs, we cannot say that A is user friendly. 

Therefore, we look into many parameters before we say user friendliness of a software

What is LOOK & FEEL

The application should be such that it should be pleasant looking [ suppose if we have red color text in yellow background, definitely we don’t feel like using it ] and make a feel to the end-user to use it.