While maintainability is predominantly about catering to other programmers, usability is about catering to all users, whoever they may be. We can say that there are two broad groups of users that are engaged in our service:
- People wishing to wield the power of our code via interfaces (GUIs, APIs, and so on)
- People wishing to make changes to our code to accomplish new tasks or fix bugs
Usability is about making our code, and the functions and interactions it enables, as useful and easy to use as possible for the full gamut of users. All code is written with at least one use case in mind, and so it is fair to judge code based on the extent to which it fulfills that purpose. Usability, however, goes further than this. Usability is not only about fulfillment of user requirements; it's about creating experiences that enable a user to achieve their goals with minimal...
