I spent a couple of days this week at the wrap-up workshop for the JISC Usability Programme. Here in Edinburgh we've just completed a project under this programme to enhance a visual workbench tool for data-intensive research, and the meeting brought us together with a dozen or so similar projects to swap war stories and thoughts.

I have to confess to being fairly new to many of the ideas, even though they've been around for a while (just ask Russell Beale of the University of Birmingham!). However, our project had excellent support from Mike Jackson here at the Institute who has a background in HCI, and a combination of his expertise in heuristic evaluation and the Institute's own software evaluation guide meant that the usability perspective really drove the project development agenda. You can follow the project's progress on the blog over at SourceForge.

Our own experiences, and the real buzz of the workshop, underlined for me the importance of software usability in the overall sustainability story. For user-facing software, a focus on the usability aspects can really pay dividends in getting people to, well, use it. And not only use it but continue to use it - and that's the beginnings of a sustainable community.

Experiences from all the usability projects are being collected at a new JISC-funded resource, UsabilityUK. UsabilityUK aims to support the increased adoption of usability methods in building research software, through case-studies, FAQs and shared experiences. The site is in beta at the moment, and they welcome feedback from users and visitors alike. You can find them in our useful resources section under software development.

By focusing on usability, we ended up with a better product - better in terms of user experience, and better in terms of sustainability too. It's a facet of development that should be in every research software engineer's toolbox!