What is usability anyway?
Usability touches every part of your life. Think about it tonight when you drive home, get through your front door to uncork a bottle of your favourite wine and relax, while listening to your favourite music.
The fact that you drove home in comfort and safety, got into your house, uncorked a bottle of wine and had the option of listening to literally thousands of your favourite pieces of music on your MP3 player without even thinking about it, is testament to how much usability touches your life.
"Usability is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs."
What is usability (Usability Professionals Association)
In 2008, 16 million households, that's 65% of the UK, had access to the Internet. Given this encouraging statistic, you'd be forgiven for assuming that now has never been a better time to launch a digital product, but research shows that users have also become a whole lot more impatient.
On average, it now takes only four seconds for a customer to make a decision about the companies they interact with on the web, including whether or not they'll use their products or services.
With this in mind, it's essential for businesses to create products that meet their customers' expectations. The aim of the game is to create an online experience that will immediately engage customers, provide the products and services that they want and give them an online experience that is quick, simple and easy to use.
Traditionally, these challenges have been met technically by software developers. Websites have become more complex, and through the advancement of web 2.0 technologies there is very little to distinguish between a traditional software application and a website. But alongside the rise of technology and the Internet, legions of usability professionals have been quietly working to shape the web and make it more usable and more closely aligned with customers' expectations.
How does it work?
We all experience the efforts of these usability professionals but the truth is that most people still don't know what usability actually means and what measurable benefit it will bring to a business.
Usability professionals work with product developers to test how easy it is for someone to use their product. This is done many different ways but the most common are:
- User testing - a usability professional will watch people use something and make recommendations on how to improve it to achieve better results for the user.
- Expert review - a usability professional will review a product and make recommendations on how to improve it to achieve better results for the user.
Across a study of 863 projects it's been estimated that you can benefit from a measurable increase of 135% by setting aside 10% of your development budget for usability , as well as other benefits such as an increased in brand loyalty and word of mouth marketing.
What about accessibility?
Products have come a long way over the past 30 years, but there is still a long way to go. One area of usability that can be overlooked is accessibility.
From 1st October 1999 it became a legal requirement that:
"A service provider had to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services".Disability Discrimination Act
Accessibility is the term that describes a field of usability that aims to improve the usability of a product for people with disabilities such as visual impairment, dyslexia, hearing impairment and mobility problems.
It's no longer acceptable for a company to create a product without providing equal access to everyone. What's more, it's bad business! I can't think of any company that would say no to a share of the £50bn that the 8.6 million registered disabled citizens in the UK have to spend - or the £175bn the UK's over-50's have to splash out (most people over 50 have some form of impairment such as deterioration of their sight).
The secret here is that accessibility isn't expensive either, as long as it's designed into your website from the start. A few simple techniques can give you access to a combined market of £225bn and if that isn't enough, optimise for accessibility and your search engine rankings are likely to improve.
Google accesses your website in the same was a visually impaired user with a screen reader does, meaning that those same simple techniques will make it piece of cake for Google to find and rank your website.
So how convinced are you that usability should be an integral part of your web presence?