What is Usability?

According to Wikipedia definition of usability, it "is the study of the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. This can include endeavors as varied as consumer electronics,communication and knowledge transfer  objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help) and mechanical objects such as a door handles or a hammer." Some of the benefits of usability includes the following

• More efficient to use — it takes less time to accomplish a particular task
• Easier to learn — an operation can be learned by observing the object at hand easily
• More satisfying to use any particular object or an operation

Complex computer systems are finding their way into everyday life, and at the same time the market is becoming more saturated with competing brands. This has led to usability becoming more popular and widely recognized in recent years as companies see the benefits of researching and developing their products by employing user-oriented instead of technology-oriented methods. By understanding and researching the interaction between product and user, the usability expert can also provide insight that is unattainable by using any traditional company-oriented market research. For example, after observing and interviewing users, the usability expert may identify needed functionality or design flaws that were not anticipated.

In the user-centered design paradigm, the product is designed with its intended users in mind at all times. In the user-driven or participatory design paradigm, some of the users become actual or de facto members of the design team thus fully participating ion the design process of an object or operation.
The term user friendly is often used as a synonym for usable, though it may also refer to accessibility. Usability is also used to describe the quality of user experience across websites, software, products and environments.

There is no consensus about the relation of the popular terms ergonomics (or human factors) and usability. Some think of usability as the software side of the larger topic of ergonomics. Others view these topics as tangential, with ergonomics focusing on physiological matters (e.g., turning a door handle) and usability focusing on psychological matters (e.g., recognizing that a door can be opened by turning its handle).

Usability is also very important in website design. According to Jakob Nielsen, "Studies of user behavior on the Web find a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow sites. People don't want to wait. And they don't want to learn how to use a home page. There's no such thing as a training class or a manual for a Web site. People have to be able to grasp the functioning of the site immediately after scanning the home page—for a few seconds at most." Otherwise, most casual users will simply leave the site and continue browsing—or shopping—somewhere else.

Why Usability is Important

On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people will leave it without performing any tasks . If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave and will not visit the website again. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they will leave. Note a pattern here? There's no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other competing websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.
The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either.

For intranet, usability is a matter of employee productivity. Time users waste being lost on your intranet or pondering difficult instructions is money you waste by paying them to be at work without getting work done.

Current best practices call for spending about 10% of a design project's budget on usability. On average, this will more than double a website's desired quality metrics and slightly less than double an intranet's quality metrics. For software and physical products, the improvements are typically smaller — but still substantial — when you emphasize usability in the design process.

For internal design projects, think of doubling usability as cutting training budgets in half and doubling the number of transactions employees perform per hour. For external designs, think of doubling sales, doubling the number of registered users or customer leads, or doubling whatever other desired goal motivated your design project.

How to Improve Usability

There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing, which has three important components:

• Get hold of some representative users, such as customers for an e-commerce site or employees for an intranet (in the latter case, they should work outside your department).
• Ask the users to perform representative tasks with the design.
• Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they have difficulties with the user interface. Keep your mouth shut and let the users do the talking to speak out what they think and feel about your website

It's important to test users individually and let them solve any problems on their own. If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you have contaminated the test results.

To identify a design's most important usability problems, testing five users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it's a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them. Iterative design is the best way to increase the quality of user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with users, the better.

User testing is different from groups, which are a poor way of evaluating design usability. Focus groups have a place in market research, but to evaluate interactive designs you must closely observe individual users as they perform tasks with the user interface. to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do.

When to Work on Usability

Usability plays a role in each stage of the design process. The resulting need for multiple studies is one reason we recommend making individual studies fast and cheap. Here are the main steps:

• Before starting a new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize, and the bad parts that give users trouble.
• Unless you're working on an intranet, test your competitors' designs to get cheap data on a range of alternative interfaces that have similar features to your own.
• Conduct a field study to see how users behave in their natural habitat.
• Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better, because you'll need to change them all based on the test results.
• Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations that run on the computer. Test each iteration thoroughly.
• Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines, whether from your own earlier studies or published research.
• Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it again. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation phases

Don't defer user testing until you have a fully implemented design. If you do, it will be impossible to fix the vast majority of the critical usability problems that the test uncovers. Many of these problems are likely to be structural, and fixing them would require major redesign exercises
The only way to a high-quality user experience is to start user testing early in the design process and to keep testing every step of the way so that you get the best results tested by so many target potential users.

So, what are you waiting for? Please drop us a line to discuss your next website design project.