Usability refers to the overall ease and comfort with which a visitor can complete a task. It has become an important facet of planning and testing software, websites and e-newsletter design. The essence of usability should pervade any design because it asks us to align personal whimsy with the culture and thinking of our audience.
Usability is serious play as opposed to solemn work or play. The idea is based on a public talk given by Paula Scher that I strongly recommend designers view, along with other videos and texts from TED on the same subject.
- Play is a great place to learn and may have rules and goals, but there is room for experimenting, cheating, and stretching the boundaries because ultimately the long-term results are frivolous.
- Solemn work follows rigid patterns about what should happen in a particular space.
- Serious play is directed at a goal but allows the designer to experiment, knowing the results may fail.
Between work and play there lies a chasm that is most visible when we compare the expectations of clients and management with designers and developers.
- Clients want a project plan with milestones and targeted goals
- Designers want to create cool things.
Usability helps bridge the gap by allowing the designer / developer to experiment before the project goes live, grounding each iteration with results from tests performed with real people. Usability is to be recommended for any design project including brochures, novels, and websites.
By letting the imagination soar, the designer is freed to try new approaches that may exceed the client’s expectations. Without it, the designer is asked to follow formulaic solutions. In the case of web design, this leads to a proliferation of websites with a top bar, horizontal navigation, white backgrounds and coloured sidebars. The navigation covers About Us, Contact Us (with Google map), Products/Services and Members Login. Sometimes the designer is strained to find the content that matches the proposed buttons; sometimes good content is shoe-horned into unoriginal categories.
What Does it Mean to be Usable?
Glad you asked because many people assume they already know. It’s like art: we don’t have a definition for good usability but we know when we handle it. Yet how many products have you purchased that would have been improved if the handle had been gently contoured or cushioned; the backrest slightly more supportive; the colour a little more blue?
Generally, experience tells us that things are more usable when they are
- Familiar, following well-known patterns and methods: buttons are framed by a bevel or ridge; clickable text is underlined or blue.
- Easy to learn. Where it veers from the familiar, design should be consistent and memorable.
- Patterned. Linear, shallow patterns are simple to learn and make navigation efficient. Complicated patterns still work if they are consistent, but are harder to learn and some people may not recognize them.
- Replicable. The visitor sees familiar patterns at every visit.
- Satisfying. The visitor leaves with a sense of accomplishment.
Within this overall recognition that things should be familiar enough in their design for users to learn the differences, there is room for great and successful variety.
Plan Your Usability Strategy
The simplest way to test usability is to ask people to try your design. Do they make mistakes? Can they find information and complete tasks? Do they get frustrated? After reading your text, they understand your message. Oh, and they are able to read your text without straining!
Testing potential visitors through many iterations of a design is costly, but compare this with the cost of completing a project that fails when released to its public.
Know What is Involved
To perform a usability study we need a list of the project”s goals, expected capabilities and target market. We can develop this together if you are unsure, but your marketing department probably has ideas about your audience. Your engineering or production unit has specifications, and your accounting arm knows what the bottom line goals must be.
Based on these goals we can
- Script scenarios
- Develop questionnaires
- Recruit end users and generate schedules for testing
- Test the graphical user interface (GUI) / layout, both in the lab and “in the field” (where your users will be)
- Present findings with actionable recommendations.
- Work with team members to prioritize recommendations and generate feasible solutions.
The end result of usability testing is a more clear view of how the end product could and should look, feel, smell, be heard, and/or taste.
Best Usability Practices
Keep testing with online focus groups. Take a page from Google and set up a team of outsiders who routinely comment on the site and comment on new and proposed features.
Perform A/B and multivariate testing to test different feature combinations for their effect. Regard each part of the page as a potential variable: style of copy, font color and size, use of images and headlines, different promotions, background textures, juxtaposition of content elements.