Today, Philip made a presentation on usability at BT, where he works. I read through it a few times and I wanted to share the contents of slide 9 with everyone:
What is Usability?
Usability has five core components:
- Learning: How easy is it for people to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter a system?
- Efficiency: Once people have learnt the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
- Memory: When people return to the system after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do people make, how sever are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the system?
If you can take these 5 core components and quantify them—such as counting how many click a user takes to accomplish Task X—then your site or business will be able to take measurable steps towards being more enjoyable for your customers, which hopefully translates to more profit.
Be creative; try and come up with obscure metrics to measure. It’s difficult to tell causation in a lot of usability tests, but easy to measure correlation. Make sure you only change one detail at a time to ensure 100% accurate results.
Do you implement usability-testing? Does it work well for you? If not, how will you implement it?
