A friend & coworker of mine sent me a link to
Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, with the intent to give some insight in to testing the UI applications that I test for my job (thanks Mike). After stepping through a few pages in Part I, it clicked for me that a number of the "
Characteristics of Great Software" that Apple lists are the same as some of
ISO 9126's quality characteristics.
After attending a
CVBI meeting this morning where the topic of conversation was "building quality in to software products", I'm really encouraged to see Apple not only list these characteristics that it thinks are important, but back up why they think they're important. One of the things that was discussed implicitly in this morning's meeting was that in order to end up with better quality products, developers (and testers) need to be taught at some point what quality is and how to get there. Apple uses this doc to clearly communicate some ways to raise the quality, not just on Apple applications, but on all applications.
Seeing this crossover between the quality characteristics that ISO setup and the ones that Apple setup really gives extra weight to these characteristics. Without having read too much in to the Apple doc yet, it looks like for the characteristics that Apple lists:
- 2 out of 7 (Ease of Use, Attractive Appearance) are related to ISO's Usability
- 1 out of 7 (Reliability) are related to ISO's Reliability
- 1 out of 7 (High Performance) are related to ISO's Efficiency
- 1 out of 7 (Interoperability) are related to ISO's Functionality
- 1 out of 7 (Adaptability) are related to ISO's Portability
- Mobility seems to be a hybrid of ISO's Usability, Functionality, and Efficiency
...interesting that in ISO terms, Apple is most heavily weighted on Usability...
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