Davey Shafik has a new post on his (redesigned) blog today with a trend that he's noticed in several of the PHP/web-related applications that he's tried - a lack of usability.

In the last week or so, we've been looking for an Open Source Groupware/CRM solution. Now I'm sure that some names probably sprung to mind as soon as you read that, try these: SugarCRM, phpGroupware, phpProjeckt, eGroupware.

We've installed each and every one of these, and whilst they may or may not have contained all the features we wanted (SugarCRM? especially), one thing they lacked was usability. It seems that all of the solutions suffer from the programmers over-engineering and I'm pretty sure that most of these developers haven't even thought about using their own products from a user standpoint.

I know that the coders out there don't always have the best skills when it comes to usability ("what? I know how to work it - it's simple!"), but I'm not really sure that there's a decent answer to this one. Part of the problem is that, in most cases at least, making something more usable generally equates to more work on the developer's side of things. And, more often than not, the developer is just trying to get the product/new features written without worrying about anything extra.

But, with usability becoming more and more of a demand in an application, how much should our focus, as developers, be shifting towards it?