Beyond Usability: Habitability

Usability is a term that, for many, describes an ideal for tool development. For all their good intentions, however, developers and usability experts still produce solutions that fail to generate the results they and others expect. Usability as a concept has come to mean something other than what early adopters of that term may have intended. This paper describes inherent weaknesses in current usability models and introduces the notion of habitability as a way to help us understand, describe and solve problems.