What is Useful Usability?
I like to think of a definition of “useful usability” as:
“Helping to make things easier to use in a quick & easy manner”
“Helping”
I think helping in this useful usability definition refers to the fact that the vast majority of usability practitioners do not actually code and make their recommended usability changes. As usability experts, all the usability practitioners I’ve ever met or known typically test, then suggest or identify improvements to teams that actually do the work. This is not a negative, it’s the same concept as an architect who does not grab hammer and nails to build the design he or she developed. What this means is that usability practitioners must be experts at propagating ideas and concepts, and must work very well with teams, both business and IT, to communicate ideas, concepts and specific recommendations for change.
“Make things easier to use”
Making things easier is what useful usability is all about. Whether it’s a ball-point pen, a company web site or a cell phone, making something easy to use provides increased user satisfaction, which ultimately provides businesses with a product or service that can be sold well. Making things easier from the business’ perspective means making things more profitable. If we do our job well, then companies make more money. We do that by making things easier for the end customer, thus more satisfying, resulting in a more rewarding customer experience which ultimately drives sales (and thus profits) for firms.
“But,” you say, “I don’t build external stuff, I only work on employee applications, or I work for a not-for-profit.”
Doesn’t matter. By making internal employee applications easier to use you are helping to drive more profits, in the form of increased employee production, for your firm. Not-for-profits are the same, your efforts make your not-for-profit more efficient, resulting in better production for the firm, which can take the savings gained and use it elsewhere to better fund operations.
Smart usability practitioners always summarize their work in terms of revenue gained, or operational savings earned for a firm. If you always communicate the business value your efforts are helping to create, you’ll pretty much always have a value for the firm and thus a job!
“Quick and easy manner”
Useful usability is about getting usability done. I once conducted an amazingly long and expensive usability test of the Blue Cross of California web site. We brought users in representing the typical Personas of our users. We set up a location near downtown LA with a full usability lab with multiple cubes, computers, video cameras and usability analysts. It took me about 9 months, from inception of the project to final delivery of the analysis document. In a massively attended meeting with all the VP “stakeholders” of each division of the company present, we delivered our analysis of where there were usability issues with the site. Half way through the presentation, one of the VP stakeholders interrupted the presentation. “OK, we get it, the web site sucks” he said. “So what are your doing to fix it?” I blinked several times, at a loss for words. The reality was I had done nothing to fix it, I had just spent almost a year simply analyzing it and pointing out what needed to be fixed. I had entered the “analysis paralysis” zone.
From that point forward, I realized that to be effective, usability should be useful, meaning efficient. Useful usability then became my mantra. Do usability testing and optimization simply, quickly, and deliver results to make changes. Usability does not have to be a mind-numbing exercise of massive proportions. It can be as simple as paper and pencil wireframes, card-sorts using 3×5 index cards and observing real users over their shoulder as they interact with a ball-point pen, web site or a cell phone.
What Useful Usability Means
So, the definition of useful usability is really about doing your usability tasks simply, quickly and delivering results that can be acted upon almost immediately. By making usability useful, you make yourself useful, and ultimately you help your firm and it’s customers, which in my opinion is one of the most satisfying and rewarding aspects of being a usability practitioner.
