About Usability

Too often, systems are designed with a focus on business goals, fancy features, and the technological capabilities of hardware or software tools. All of these approaches to system design omit the most important part of the process – the end user.

No matter what you’re developing, there’s a user-centered way of doing it. Users should be considered throughout the website design process. Usability should not be an afterthought. Testing and fixing a website after it has been built is inefficient and unlikely to produce optimal results. The best approach to take is to incorporate a model of “pervasive usability” into your design and production process.

Legacy systems are entire systems or system features that users have used for a long period of time to fulfill their needs with respect to a task or goal. The more frequently that customers use a system feature, the more likely it is that the system’s brand will become defined by that feature.

Web applications come in all shapes and sizes. While there is plenty of overlap between websites and web applications, one of the hallmarks of a web application is the presence of forms through which information can be submitted to a database.

Before you can effectively design or test a website or application, you must define the problem you wish to solve. You may have the idea that you want to “modernize” an existing website. That is a start, yet “modern” does not clearly define the problem to solve. Defining what “modern” means to you will clarify the specific issues that your project will address.

Project stakeholders are anyone with an invested interest in your project. These may include business owners and investors, business managers, marketing professionals, sales representatives, project managers, developers, network administrators, user experience engineers, customer support representatives, technicians, and end users.

Just as computers vary by operating system, processor speed, screen size, memory, and networking abilities, users vary in ways both expected and unexpected. Some differences that are more commonly thought of are language, gender, age, cultures, preferences, and interests. But some of the differences that need to be addressed more by the software and web development community are skills, ability levels, and constraints under which users may be operating.

After conducting user research, such as a task analysis, surveys, interviews, and observations, you should have enough information to develop a set of requirements for the system. Requirements specification keeps project stakeholders and developers focused on the goals of the design. These requirements should also be used during quality assurance testing, to ensure that system features and functionality have been designed to support users, based on their needs and preferences.

Users can feel lost even in a relatively small information space that is not well organized.  Information architecture focuses on designing effective navigation, organization, labeling, and search systems. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws upon the research and practices of information and library science, computer science, graphic design, and psychology.

Customer Experience and Employee Productivity:  two benefits of a website focused on usability.  A customer experience is the holistic experience that customers perceive as they interact with every facet of a product or service. Individual experiences add up to form a concept, which becomes the product’s “brand”.  When re-designing the customer experience, it is a good idea to also evaluate how the change may affect employees of the organization.  The level of employee productivity, with respect to a specific task or set of tasks, is often based on the tools that employees use to perform job-related tasks. In many cases, a software application or website is one of those tools. As employees use these tools to do their job, they develop a perception of each tool’s user experience and level of usability.

ROI (or return on investment) refers to the returned value in profit, savings, or productivity that can be attributed to a given investment. The returns generated from investments in website and software development are measured in both quantitative and qualitative of ways. Investments in usability can be put to the same tests. While usability improvements have often focused on qualitative metrics, they can be measured in quantitative terms as well. Improving the usability of a website can increase sales, reduce customer service calls, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The following software applications and websites describe useful tools for conducting usability research.

Although a usable system should seem intuitive for the user, getting there is not always intuitive for developers.  Usability consultants work with designers and developers to look at how a product meets user needs so that they can improve the product to enhance productivity, increase user satisfaction, and minimize user errors.  If usability consultants are brought in before a website or software product is created, they can help developers achieve more consistently usable results.