What Makes Something Less Usable?

Why are so many high-tech products so hard to use?

In this section, we explore this question, discuss why the situation exists, and examine the overall antidote to this problem. Many of the examples in this book involve not only consumer hardware, software, and web sites but also documentation such as user's guides and embedded assistance such as on-screen instructions and error messages. The methods in this book also work for appliances such as music players, cell phones, .and game consoles. Even products, such as the control panel for an ultrasound machine or the user

manual for a digital camera, fall within the scope of this book.

What Makes Something Less Usable?

Why are so many high-tech products so hard to use?

In this section, we explore this question, discuss why the situation exists, and examine the overall antidote to this problem. Many of the examples in this book involve not only consumer hardware, software, and web sites but also documentation such as user's guides and embedded assistance such as on-screen instructions and error messages. The methods in this book also work for appliances such as music players, cell phones, .and game consoles. Even products, such as the control panel for an ultrasound machine or the user

manual for a digital camera, fall within the scope of this book.

What Do We Mean by "Usable"? - IV

True usability is invisible. If something is going well, you don't notice it. 

If the temperature in a room is comfortable, no one complains. But usability in products happens along a continuum. How usable is your product? Could it be more usable even though users can accomplish their goals? Is it worth improving?

Most usability professionals spend most of their time working on eliminating design problems, trying to minimize frustration for users. This is a laudable goal! But know that it is a difficult one to attain for every user of your product. 

And it affects only a small part of the user's experience of accomplishing a goal. And, though there are quantitative approaches to testing the usability of products, it is impossible to measure the usability of something. You can only measure how unusable it is: how many problems people have using something, what the problems are and why. 

By incorporating evaluation methods such as usability testing throughout an iterative design process, it is possible to make products and services that are useful and usable, and possibly even delightful.

What Do We Mean by "Usable"? - III

Accessibility and usability are siblings. In the broadest sense, accessibility is about having access to the products needed to accomplish a goal. But in this book when we talk about accessibility, we are looking at what makes products usable by people who have disabilities. Making a product usable for people with disabilities —or who are in special contexts, or both —almost always benefits people who do not have disabilities. Considering accessibility for people with disabilities can clarify and simplify design for people who face temporary limitations (for example, injury) or situational ones (such as divided attention or bad environmental conditions, such as bright light or not enough light). There are many tools and sets of guidelines available to assist you in making accessible designs. (We include pointers to accessibility resources on the web site that accompanies this book (see www.wiley.com/ go/usabilitytesting for more information.) You should acquaint yourself with accessibility best practices so that you can implement them in your

organization's user-centered design process along with usability testing and other methods.

Making things more usable and accessible is part of the larger discipline of •. user-centered design (UCD), which encompasses a number of methods and techniques that we will talk about later in this chapter. In turn, user-centered design rolls up into an even larger, more holistic concept called experience design. Customers may be able to complete the purchase process on your web site, but how does that mesh with what happens when the product is delivered, maintained, serviced, and possibly returned? What does your organization

do to support the research and decision-making process leading up to the purchase? All of these figure in to experience design. 

Which brings us back to usability.

What Do We Mean by "Usable"? - II

Efficiency is the quickness with which the user s goal can be accomplished accurately and completely and is usually a measure of time. For example, you might set a usability testing benchmark that says "95 percent of all users will be able to load the software within 10 minutes."

Effectiveness refers to the extent to which the product behaves in the way that users expect it to and the ease with which users can use it to do what they intend. This is usually measured quantitatively with error rate. Your usability testing measure for effectiveness, like that for efficiency, should be tied to some percentage of total users. Extending the example from efficiency, the benchmark might be expressed as "95 percent of all users will be able to load the software correctly on the first attempt."

Learnability is a part of effectiveness and has to do with the user's ability to operate the system to some defined level of competence after some predetermined amount and period of training (which may be no time at all). It can also refer to the ability of infrequent users to relearn the system after periods of inactivity.

Satisfaction refers to the user's perceptions, feelings, and opinions of the product, usually captured through both written and oral questioning. Users are more likely to perform well on a product that meets their needs and provides satisfaction than one that does not Tvoicallv „c and rank products that they trv and ZT/ users are as» for problems that occur 'eveai causes and reasons product usable is never simply the abilitv  the numbere can tell us no there ,s a distinctive qualitative element to how usable somethine is a well, which is hard to capture with numbers and is difficult to pin down to do with how one interprets the data in order to know how to fix a problem because the behavioral data tells you why there is a problem. Any do tor

can measure a patient's vital signs, such as blood pressure and pulse rate 

But interpreting those numbers and recommending the appropriate course of action for a specific patient is the true value of the physician JudeinR the several possible alternative causes of a design problem, and knowing which are especially likely in a particular case, often means looking beyond individual data points in order to design effective treatment. There exist these little subtleties that evade the untrained eye.

What Do We Mean by "Usable"? - I

In large part, what makes something usable is the absence of frustration in using it. As we lay out the process and method for conducting usability testing in this book, we will rely on this definition of "usability;" when a product or service is truly usable, the user can do what he or she wants to do the way he or she expects to be able to do it, without hindrance, hesitation, or questions. 

But before we get into defining and exploring usability testing, let's talk a bit more about the concept of usability and its attributes. To be usable, a product or service should be useful, efficient, effective, satisfying, learnable, and accessible.

Usefulness concerns the degree to which a product enables a user to achieve his or her goals, and is an assessment of the user's willingness to use the product at all. Without that motivation, other measures make no sense, because the product will just sit on the shelf. If a system is easy to use, easy to learn, and even satisfying to use, but does not achieve the specific goals of a specific user, it will not be used even if it is given away for free. Interestingly enough, usefulness is probably the element that is most often overlooked during experiments and studies in the lab.

In the early stages of product development, it is up to the marketing team to ascertain what product or system features are desirable and necessary before other elements of usability are even considered. Lacking that, the development team is hard-pressed to take the user's point of view and will simply guess or, even worse, use themselves as the user model. This is very often where a system-oriented design takes hold.

What Makes Something Usable?

What makes a product or service usable?

Usability is a quality that many products possess, but many, many more lack. There are historical, cultural, organizational, monetary, and other reasons for this, which are beyond the scope of this book. Fortunately, however, there are customary and reliable methods for assessing where design contributes to usability and where it does not, and for judging what changes to make to designs so a product can be usable enough to survive or even thrive in the marketplace.

It can seem hard to know what makes something usable because unless you have a breakthrough usability paradigm that actually drives sales (Apple's iPod comes to mind), usability is only an issue when it is lacking or absent. Imagine a customer trying to buy something from your company's e-commerce web site. The inner dialogue they may be having with the site might sound like this: / can't find what I'm looking for. Okay, I have found what I'm looking for, but I can't tell how much it costs. Is it in stock? Can it be shipped to where I need it to go? Is shipping free if 1 spend this much? Nearly everyone who has ever tried to purchase something on a web site has encountered issues like these. 

It is easy to pick on web sites (after all there are so very many of them), but there are myriad other situations where people encounter products and services that are difficult to use every day. Do you know how to use all of the features on your alarm clock, phone, or DVR? When you contact a vendor, how easy is it to know what to choose in their voice-based menu o options?