Usability – The Most Important Software Feature?
Jim Schibler
Product Management Leader & Career Consultant — Bringing Clarity to a Complex World
Like many software users, I often observe issues that make me wonder if the people who created the software really understand my needs. “Spend 5 minutes trying to accomplish the task I’m trying to do, and you’ll discover multiple flaws in your product!” Indeed, it was my frustration as a user of products I considered to be poorly designed that made me jump at an opportunity to get into Product Management and do something about it.
Throughout my career, I’ve striven to empathize with users and their needs, and I’ve emphasized to my development teams the importance of providing a great user experience. That effort paid off; high usability was a key advantage I used to secure the market leader position against formidable competitors.
In this article, I’ll briefly define usability, list some reasons that usability is so important, and discuss factors that contribute to — or detract from — usability. ?My hope is that people involved in creating products will apply some of these principles to make those products better, and that software purchasers will use the principles to evaluate the quality of products and make better buying decisions.
What is Usability?
Usability refers to how easily a product can be used to accomplish a goal. Because the goal is achieved only through the interaction of product and its user, usability isn’t an inherent characteristic of a product alone; it must be considered in the context of the people who will use that product. Highly skilled users with specialized domain expertise (such as graphic designers) might consider a full-featured software package like Adobe Illustrator easy to use, whereas an office assistant who just wants to create a simple poster for the breakroom might find the same software overwhelming.
Usability should also be considered in two contexts:
1.????Ease of Routine Use
Ease of routine use is certainly important for any tool you’re likely to use frequently. I can be highly productive with Microsoft Excel because I’ve learned most of its capabilities, and I’ve taught myself fast ways to access its powerful features so that I can quickly run calculations and generate the output I need.
2.????Ease of Learning
Ease of learning is important for any tool you won’t be using frequently, because you’ll need to essentially re-learn how to use it every time you come back to it. It’s also important for situations in which team members are frequently replaced, because every team member will have to go through a learning process.
Why Customers Should Care About Usability
It should be obvious that high usability can improve efficiency and produce better results, thus reducing costs and improving profitability, but there’s another important benefit to high usability. People who get to work with highly usable products tend to be more satisfied in their jobs than those who have to struggle with poorly designed products, and are less likely to leave for a better working environment.
Unfortunately, a lot of purchasing decisions are made by people who never have to spend time using the products. If they fail to involve the end users in the decision process, they may not be aware of the importance of usability, or know how to assess it. This can result in long-term commitments to products that will create ongoing frustration, errors, and general inefficiencies. (I saw this first-hand when my employer switched from an ASK ERP system to Oracle 11i, which turned out to be some of the worst-designed software I have ever experienced. Observing the time wasted as even experienced users navigated their way through its clunky user interface, I’m sure that the lost productivity cost my employer many thousands of dollars per year.)
Why Product Creators Should Care About Usability
There are many important reasons creators should strive to make their software products highly usable:
Lower training costs
Everyone who uses software needs to invest time and effort into learning how to use it. Internally, this includes sales and service staff, and often includes people in other departments (such R&D, marketing, and manufacturing). Externally, this includes not only end users, but also third parties (such as distributors) who may sell and service the product. Improving usability can dramatically lower the time required for people to learn the product, lowering training costs.
Faster deployments
Nowadays, a successful software sale means more than shipping a sales order; you really aren’t done until the customer has the software installed and is using it effectively (especially with SaaS products). Higher usability means the customer becomes productive with the software faster, and can start getting return on their investment in it sooner.
Higher customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is one of the key measures companies use to measure their performance. Satisfied customers typically produce more revenue and cost less to support than customers who are less satisfied. They also tend to use the software more, which reduces the risk that they might cancel software subscriptions.
Lower marketing costs
Satisfied customers tend to share their positive experiences, increasing awareness of products and encouraging potential buyers to consider the products. Not only does this exposure come at no direct cost to the software vendor, it’s also ‘social proof’ that tends to be trusted more than anything the vendor says about their own product. With high-quality sales leads created by satisfied customers, vendors don’t need to rely on expensive marketing campaigns to attract new potential customers.
What Makes for Good Usability?
People often think of usability as a subjective thing, one that’s hard to describe and quantify. (This calls to mind Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous quote about what constitutes pornography: “I know it when I see it”.) ?But there are actually clear design characteristics and tests that can be used to qualify if products (especially software products) will be easy to use.
In the following sections, I’ll discuss some key factors that contribute to usability — or the lack of it.
Simplicity
Simplicity is about focusing on the essence. It’s about minimizing cognitive loads, limiting complexity, eliminating clutter, removing distractions — in short, eliminating all that is irrelevant to make it easy for the user to focus on the task and on the tools needed to accomplish that task.
Maintaining simplicity can be very challenging for product designers who are trying to provide broad capabilities and great flexibility in order to meet needs of diverse users, because accommodating a wide range of needs means offering choices, and every choice presented to users increases complexity. The consequences of adding a feature include far more than the increase in cognitive load on the user; each feature must be prioritized, designed, developed, tested (on an ongoing basis), documented, debugged, secured , and maintained. In addition, features often have interdependencies; those intricacies increase complexity. Worse, the impacts aren’t linear; as the number of features increases, the complexity goes up exponentially.
Some design approaches can help mitigate such problems. For example, building task-focused modules rather than a big monolithic solution can increase flexibility and simplify testing, though new problems can arise if the modules aren’t consistent in appearance and behavior, and if their interfaces are not well designed. (The growth of microservices is an example of this modular approach; each microservice is a self-contained ‘black box’ that has well defined inputs, processing, and outputs.)
Complexity of user interfaces can be managed through certain techniques:
I can share a story about two microwave ovens that were in the lunch room of a building I worked in for several years. One oven was an older unit that had only two controls: a Power Level switch, and a timer dial that had two ranges (1-15 minutes spanning a third of the dial, and 16-60 minutes represented by the rest). The other oven was a new model with an LED display and a panel full of buttons: digits 0-9, Cook Time, Power Level, Start, Stop, Pause, various “shortcuts” (Popcorn, Beverage, Turkey, etc.).
The older unit got used at least twice as much as the newer one, because you could simply place your food in it, slam the door, spin the dial, and come back when its bell went ding. The newer unit required you to press Cook Time, then punch in some digits, then press Power Level, then punch in more digits, then press a Start button. (Other sequences were not accepted; you got nagging Error messages.) ?Few people had the motive and the patience to learn the ‘proper’ sequence, and it was clear that too many irrelevant choices were being offered on the control panel. (How often are you really going to try to microwave a turkey in a 1 cubic foot oven?)
Familiarity
We’re able to operate much more quickly and effectively with familiar situations, because we don’t need to spend as much time observing and deciding before acting. Our accumulated knowledge lets us confidently move forward quickly when our current situation echoes ones we’ve learned before.
Using Google Sheets has been mostly straightforward for me, because the behaviors and keyboard shortcuts that are very familiar to me work the same as they do in Microsoft Excel, where I learned them.
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Discoverability
Discoverability is all about how easy it is for you to find what you’re seeking — or to learn about functionality that you’re likely to need either soon or in the future.
I once attended a talk given by Jensen Harris, who led the Microsoft Office development team. He noted that 4 of the top 10 features requested for Office were already present in the product. This made clear that the features were not sufficiently discoverable, and that (along with other issues) led to a major user interface redesign effort that produced the Ribbon design that debuted in Office 2007. Though not a perfect solution, the Ribbon provides a standardized way to present functionality in a relatively compact, consistent way.
(The Ribbon user interface was a significant improvement over Microsoft’s previous attempts to bring awareness to product features. Many people remember being pestered by animated ‘assistants’ that often interrupted what you were doing to try to tell you about a feature, when all you wanted to do was get a simple task done. “Clippy Must Die” became a meme before the word meme became well known!)
Predictability
Products tend to be easy to use when they work the way we expect them to. We find functionality where we expect it to be, and when we use it, we get the results we expect to.
To a large degree, our expectations are shaped by our prior experiences. When we get accustomed to a popular user interface, we expect that other products to behave in similar ways, and we get annoyed or frustrated if they don’t.
Product designers need to be careful to align with industry norms, and deviate from them only when doing so offers an advantage to the user that outweighs the inconvenience of conflicting with expectations.
Consistency
Closely related to predictability is consistency: consistency in how a particular element looks and behaves, and consistency in appearance and behavior between related different elements.
My wife’s laptop keyboard drives me nuts, because it has the Fn key in the lower left corner, where most keyboards have the Ctrl key. Having trained myself to use Ctrl key combinations, I constantly find myself getting undesired results when I try to edit and format text on her machine.
Many people find LinkedIn’s Invitation manager frustratingly inconsistent. On the desktop browser version, you get a chance to write a personal note after you click <Connect>, but on the mobile version, clicking <Connect> immediately sends a generic invitation, and there is no way to add a note after the fact. (To include a note, you have to avoid the temptation of clicking the <Connect> button, and go elsewhere. For details, see Why You Should Always Personalize Your LinkedIn Invitations.)
Control
Feeling like you are in control of the software — and not the other way around — is an essential part of usability. Without a clear and constant sense of control, you soon feel helpless and frustrated.
One time, when I was delivering a training session in a hotel meeting room, my slides started advancing without any commands from me. Using my remote controller, I tried to go back to the slide I’d been discussing, but the slides again advanced. I was soon unable to get the show to stop on any one slide — they kept going forth and back willy-nilly. While trying to suppress my feelings of anxiety, frustration, and bewilderment, I asked the hotel’s audio-visual specialist for help. It turns out that another group in an adjacent room was also using a radio-frequency remote controller, and that we were getting cross-talk between the rooms that was causing both our slide shows to seem out of control! (A better product design team would have anticipated this risk, and provided means to detect and mitigate such conflicts.)
You may also experience frustration if you find that you cannot do something that you think you should be able to. I experienced frustration while posting this article on LinkedIn: there’s a Messaging subwindow that’s permanently parked in the lower-right corner of the browser window, and there’s content behind it that I can’t view. I can expand and collapse the Messaging subwindow, but I can’t move it around like I can with nearly every other window. Changing the size of the main window doesn’t help; the Messaging subwindow continues to prevent me from seeing all the content in the status pane of the main window. There’s no option to hide or disable the Messaging window, and no way to move the status pane either, so I’m left without a solution and feeling like I don’t have the control over the software that I should.
Responsiveness
Whenever you have a system that gives a delayed response — whether that’s a tub faucet that takes half a minute to respond to a temperature change, or a word processor that can’t keep up with your typing speed — you can feel disconnected and frustrated. Product designers need to evaluate their systems for responsiveness — not only under standard conditions, but also under non-ideal conditions that users may experience.
I’ll never forget the Windows 98 installation process, which displayed an animated beating drum icon while files were copied. I tried to run through the process twice, and both times it locked up (the drum stopped beating) about 10 minutes into the process. I started it a third time and had to leave for the day; when I came into the office the next day, it said “Installation Complete!” Wondering what had happened, I ran the installation process again, and discovered that the drum would stop beating for 35 minutes, then resume its animation. Obviously, the lack of feedback led me to wrong conclusions the first few times.
Empathy
It’s amazing how often producers of products seem to have no understanding of — or at least respect for — user priorities. The most glaring example that comes to mind for me is Microsoft Windows Update. I know the importance of keeping software current, but why must patches be installed and reboots forced when I’m busy trying to get my work done? Why can’t that maintenance be done in the middle of the night when I’m asleep and wouldn’t be impacted? But no, you have to automatically install updates 10 minutes before I’m about to make an important presentation, and unless I notice what you’re up to and click Postpone (or sometimes even if I do!), you’ll force a reboot of my computer and cause me to lose all my current work in progress and force me to wait at least 5 minutes before I can use my computer again.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d like to share my feelings with the person who decided this was going to be acceptable to users…
Anticipation of User’s Next Need
Most product managers and software developers are familiar with the concept of a “User Story”, which describes a typical user, what that user is trying to accomplish, and why the user is trying to accomplish it (the greater goal). Unfortunately, too many user stories are atomic and done in isolation, so the resulting “solutions” end up fragmented instead of feeling integrated.
An example is a manufacturing management software system. A common sequence of needs goes like this:
Well-designed software provides an easy path through this sequence of tasks – you can just click on an item to navigate to one of the other views, and all the contextual information needed is automatically carried along to the next view. Less-optimal software requires you to return to a top-level menu before choosing each task, and to jot down part numbers along the way so that you can enter them when input is requested in another task. It’s easy to understand how much more productive you can be with the software that was designed with inter-related tasks in mind.
Advocate for Usability!
Now that you’ve had a chance to consider the importance of usability and some of the factors that contribute to it, I hope you’ll join me in advocating for it, whether you’re a producer of software, a user of it, or both. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to look forward to a future in which our experiences with software are more productive and more enjoyable.
Jim Schibler leads product management teams that deliver software experiences customers love, and he coaches professionals on job search and career management. He writes on a broad range of topics; see more of his articles at his website.
Copyright ? 2021 Jim Schibler — All rights reserved
Image credits: Angry User Icon courtesy FreeSVG.org; Computer Training Session courtesy Wikimedia Commons; Net Promoter Score image courtesy Ha Nguyen; Clippy satire courtesy ServiceNowGuru.com; Windows Update dialog courtesy Raymond.cc.