Easy Does It – yet another pitch for software usability
The software industry is known for inflicting pain.
This instant, millions worldwide are attempting to use software or an electronic product that is difficult or confusing. Is that your product? As soon as they lose confidence, the moment trust evaporates, one of your business opportunities goes away. Poof.
And as they X out of your life forever, they will be muttering, “Why did they make it so hard?”
We know people benefit from ease of use. We know making products easier to use increases customer loyalty, brand lustre, market share. We know that companies investing in ease of use enjoy those benefits. Studies prove this point repeatedly. Usability equates to profitability.
So why is good usability not the norm?
There is always the features vs. usability battle in development projects. You can’t see usability or good user experience in a list of features. Usability is like breathing, and equally difficult to explain. There is always the time-to-market battle, which usability often loses. When the almighty release schedule shoves usability design, testing, and the fix cycles aside is when we agree that:
“We don’t have time to do it right, but do we have time to do it over.”
At least one study by Dr. Clare-Marie Karat shows that companies that commit to ease of use can exceed anticipated earnings, or in common parlance, ‘beat the Street’. Building user experience design into product development saves money. It is more economical to consider user needs in the early stages of design than it is to solve them later – it has been shown that every dollar spent to resolve a problem during design is worth $10 during development and ten times that much after the release.
You can do usability testing on paper prototypes. How cheap is that? Even the most basic click-through prototypes cost time and money. You can do 1-1 focus reviews with users of existing products and let them steer you. The UX designer’s job is to keep your users and customers involved through the entire development cycle, not just at pre-release testing.
Dr. Karat’s work has shown that focusing on user experience can advance release dates. Avoiding the urge to skip usability concerns in design can save a large fraction of service costs down the road – help requests, change requests, bugs, and worst of all, product returns.
One hidden advantage of integrating good UX design – a happier project. Your company has a vision statement, right? Your project has a mission too. If it is clear that everyone involved is saluting those goals, the level of frustration at meeting user needs will be low.
The core of usability is reduced time on task, ergo, productivity.
References (yes I know – same title, but different documents):
Tom Mulhern
It’s a sad-but-true tale. Companies often look at the features and either ignore usability or de-prioritize it. Features sell and can be presented as a competition-killer, but ease of use (or SANITY of use) isn’t easy for them to pitch or prove. Case in point: I expected DVD players to “learn” from the usability failures of VCRs. I was sorely disappointed. Boggling, obscure features have been added, and the remote has even more buttons than my ol’ VCR. The iPhone goes the other way, in that you almost require no manual or even a detailed quick-start guide. Apple gets usability. Toyota gets usability, too. Check out the display in a Prius. It’s simple, and by combining only four physical buttons with clear, simple screens filled with touch-screen buttons, you get a very straightforward interface.
Carol Winslow
Even though companies have time to do it over, they don’t get it right because usability never makes it on the do-over list. That’s probably because it was not valued in the first place. I worked for a company that had been in business for many years before they even thought about doing usability testing. They brought in an independent testing firm, and I was permitted to observe the action. I watched in horror as the subjects stumbled through the documentation trying to install an expansion board in a PC. Most got lost early on, and even with prompting, continued to struggle with the instructions in the user guide. Thank goodness I was not the author of that terrible tome. However, I implemented some changes in my documents based on my observations of the testing. The firm was only around for a short time, so I don’t know if I made a difference. However, the experience turned me into a user/usability advocate.