What is usability?
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| | Usability is rather an awkward word that describes how easy and effective it is to use something. Note that ease of use is sometimes mistaken for usability. The touchscreens in UK job centres are very easy to use - it is just a case of using your fingers to touch screen buttons. But this physical ease of use is not matched by the tortuous process of using these screens to find jobs.
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| | An example of a highly usable product is an old fashioned microwave. You know, the ones with a rotary control for power and one for time. You can see instantly the power being used to cook your food, and how long is left. Better still, a swift nudge of these controls can bump the power up or down, or add an extra minute.
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| | Now look at a modern push button microwave. You try to do these things, and more likely than not, it will not be possible.
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| | The underlying problem is that usability often takes a back door to the internals by the product developers, or the aesthetics by the marketing people. And we, the public are guilty in our susceptability to looks above usability. Me included, even when I try not to.
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| | But a highly usable product often wins out - the Apple Mackintosh has principally lasted this long on that feature alone. It has always been more expensive than traditional PCs.
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The invisibility of usability
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| | The tragedy about a highly usable product is that it is almost by definition rarely noticed. And hence, it is so rarely recognised by industry. The better the product, the more obvious, and dismissable the design appears to be.
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| | Good design is amost always transparent, since it rarely intrudes on the use of a product - you are so caught up in using the product that you can barely recognise that it was carefully designed to be like this.
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| | Even sadder is that the very best usability is characterised in many subtle ways that can take a long time and many interations of the design process to achieve. The harder the effort, the less there is to see.
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| | Many developers create products that make them look clever, or at least provide some flavour of the effort incurred. It takes a good and brave designer to prune down functionality to match user needs. Smart features that do not really benefit the user just complicate matters, detracting from the key features.
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