Ten good reasons for usability

Zehn gute Gründe für Usability

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This contribution gives you ten good reasons for usability, which provide you with arguments for discussions. With these arguments you can stand your ground against the project manager. We consider this contribution a little everyday life support for web designers and usability specialists. Read, copy, use. Always have an answer ready to the question what is usability good for.

1. Usability saves money

The normal website development: discuss, implement, publish. Go one step back and look at the results. Wonder why it does not work, discuss, implement, publish. The never ending story.

The development of such projects is expensive. And at the end the customer can only suspect why the website does not have the promised success. Our alternative proposal: analyse the users of the website, define your targets, draw up a prototype, test the prototype, improve it, test the prototype again until it achieves the set targets. Then implement the website. An implementation of the website, which achieves its targets, means - better results.

2. Usability brings money

The analysis of the target readers and their expectations are not new, however, they have been forgotten. When using the principle of the user analysis you make sure that your web project satisfies the user demands. If the website fulfils the user demands, it is useful. If the website is useful, it will be used. If users use the website, they will earn money.

3. Usability creates loyalty

Old economy - imagine a shopping precinct in which all stores offer the same goods. How do you make your choice?

First of all, you will look at the offers in the shop windows and then you will make the decision. So far so good. This is the status of the web. However, why do you buy more frequently in one store? Because the quality and the prices of the goods are good and the service is friendly. It is a nice store. And you feel comfortable in the rooms.

This is the shopping feeling in the shopping precinct. Transfer the same principles to the web and you have user experience. Give your customers the user experience they deserve and they will return.

4. Usability creates confidence

Would you feel secure in a car, which permanently informs you about a disastrous mistake? Would you like to use a hammer drill, at which you have to press a confusing number of buttons in order to work with it? Websites and web applications are less risky, however, the facts are the same. A bad design confuses the user and makes him suspicious.

Avoid surprising effects. Make sure that everything works like the user expects it. Then the user will feel right and put his trust in you.

5. Usability secures return of investment (ROI)

Websites and web applications which place the user in the centre of attention will be more useful than such websites, which place the developer in the centre of attention. Designers who invest money in the development of user-friendly websites will have successful, satisfied customers and thus get more customers by word of mouth. Everybody wins. Everybody except designers who design their website without knowing the user. Of course, also their customers are the losers.

6. Usability increasing transparency

An extensive user and task analysis means that the product requirements are clearly described from the beginning of the project. All participants know exactly on which product they work. Due to this product description the customer can articulate his wishes of modification at an early stage. Then user tests can help to judge if it is a great idea.

Do not judge due to opinions, but make your statements due to user observations.

7. Usability reduces after-sales service and maintenance costs

If the after-sales service rushes around, because the users are complaining, it will get expensive. Apart from this, customers who complain will not remain customers for a long time. Removing problems after the online start is more expensive than working well and in a user-oriented way from the beginning.

Organize the development process in such a way that the users have no problems with your website. You can guarantee this by analysing who your users are and which targets they have.

Prevention is better than cure.

8. Usability reduces risk

In the old economy the product development process includes different stages of tests, product acceptances, focus groups and a long list. Only products which successfully run through this process go into the production.

In the new economy it is vice versa. First of all, programme your product and then ask the user if he needs it.

Why do companies of the old economy take prototype stages so seriously? Because the manufacture of products is expensive. Nobody can allow himself to give a shelf warmer into production. Why do web designers not make the same?

Good question. Can they afford this risk?

9. Usability involves a decisive competition advantage

It is a sad fact that even today most websites are not user-friendly.

From a positive point of view you can say that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Websites with an acceptable level of user-friendliness will have more traffic than the ones of the competitors.

As long as user-friendliness is more the exception than the rule, companies will be able to take a great advantage of an above-average user-friendliness of their website.

When everyone listens to their users before coding starts, usability will be a sine qua non.

10. Usability takes you one step higher

The days on which the product requirement was valid: the main thing is that it works, will soon be over.

If something does not work - the customers will realise it. If something does not work correctly - the customers will also realise this.

User-friendliness is the added value, which carries a website or an application beyond the "new economy".

Usability a definition

The term usability is more and more extended. What originally referred to the fact of how easy it is to use a product now refers to an abundance of things. User centred design (UCD), usability testing and in some particularly sad cases to graphic design.

Our definition: usability is a user-focused starting point for thought in design. This starting point of thought reaches from the interactive user testing until the application of user-centred design guidelines. At the development of enterprise level software to simple websites.

In the centre of attention of the development is neither the programming, the scope of function nor the technology.

In the centre of attention is the user!

03/2004, Alfred Himmelweiss, Graham Ball

Alfred Himmelweiss is initiator and head of usabilityreport.de. From 2000-2002 he was the head of media and interface design at Intershop. Graham Ball is an interaction designer at Intershop and an author.

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