What is Usability?

The term “usability” is often applied to objects and digital user interfaces, people generally understand this to be “the ease at which a person can interact with a product” and at a high level this is fine. However, to understand how usability affects the success of a product, such as a web site, the term needs to be broken into various components:

• Familiarity – Are the functions obvious to use so that the user just knows what to do? Is information easy to find?
• Learnability – Is the system easy to learn how to use - crucial for more complex functions where familiarity alone can’t be depended upon.
• Memorability – When returning to the product can they still use it?
• Efficiency – Are the number of steps and time required to complete a task unnecessarily bloated? Is the interaction smooth and pleasant for the user?.
• Predictability - Does the site/function do what the user expected?

Why is usability important?

If a web site can’t be used people won’t use it – they leave the site. Worse still, with the ease of access to services like Facebook and Twitter, people are likely to advertise bad usability rather than complain direct.

In getting things right people will be happy to use your product, return to use it and hopefully be happy to shout about it. It will also mean your training and support needs will be reduced.

How do products become usable?

If your product is designed with the user in mind, with iterative development and testing, then there is every chance that it will be usable. It is crucial that you understand your user group and what they want to do by getting users involved at an early stage and continue to involve them throughout a project. By focusing a project on the end users of the system from the outset, in combination with the business needs, usability will be heading in the right direction.

Getting users involved

To drive the usability of your product, there is nothing quite like observing and speaking to the real end users. If there is already a system in place, understand their pain points and what they typically do and want to do. If the users simply don’t need to do something, challenge the business case. Consider:

• Why do users want to use the product?
• How do they’d expect to fulfil tasks?
• How will they be interacting with the product?

Observing

If there is an existing way to do the task, watch how they do it - focus on the idiosyncratic uses.

Focus groups

Focus groups can be an incredibly efficient way to collate information. In this environment individuals feed off one another’s desire to express what they want and how they want to go about it.

Interviews

Perhaps the end users are just too hard to get together or focus groups are too daunting for some individuals - Identify these people and speak to them independently. Also, consider that you don’t have to meet face-to-face, make use of voice and screen collaboration tools.

Personas

If the budget does not stretch to engaging with real users consider creating personas. A persona is a fictional user that represents key users groups. The personas are named characters that attempt to amalgamate groups of typical user’s needs, attitudes, skills and more. The personas may be fictional but they can be extremely powerful tools. Print the personas out, stick them to a wall and challenge the functionality against them to keep the project user focused.

Design in Usability

Understanding the needs of users in combination with the business case will stand you in good stead. Remember that in most cases problems have been addressed before. Consider - how people interact with the web has evolved greatly since its inception and people expect certain functionality to be available in certain ways, don’t ignore the norm! Also, embrace usability guidelines and patterns (“widely applicable solution for commonly occurring problems” – ref: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-patterns/index.html).

Usability testing

Involve your users in testing. From the initial paper prototyping right through to product acceptance testing - observe, question and measure your user’s ability to perform tasks unaided. Test results should be fed back into future design and development iterations.

Agile Methodology, if applied correctly can really help to deliver a usable project if users are engaged in the iterative specification, development and testing stages. This does not mean you can forget users until after the first development Sprint, doing so will lead to wastage. Rather, engage users early and build in additional features in iterative cycles - Sprints.

Accessibility vs Usability

The term “accessibility” is often used alongside “usability”. This is usually born out of confusion where one ends and the other starts. I’ll return to “accessibility” in a future blog.

To conclude...

• Engage with users
• Define clear and measurable goals
• User test, test, and test again
• Start simple and improve iteratively