What does Usability mean to you?

[LazyJim]

Usability -

Without looking it up, what have you always thought or assumed usability to be?

Or if you know for sure exactly what it is because you have the experience, how do you describe or define it?

<edit>
I'm particulaly interested in views of people who don't know for sure, have assumed they knew the answer but might be wrong.

I'll take private comments if you want, PM me.
</edit>

This is meant to give me an impression of V7N members' current perception of usability.

[John Scott]

Usablity means easy to use, easy to understand and navigate.

[cimmeron]

how well an object performs it's intended purpose(s) without frustrating the operator.

[gaz545]

something to do with the effectiveness of transfering information and the smoth interaction of the end user with the website. as well as being able to be used with people with disabilites

[Atom]

<bumping a spam thread off the index page, please ignore this post>

[etech-racheal]

Usability means convenient to use. High usability means efficient, easy to learn.

[wz5q]

Easy enough for the average "Joe" (or "Josiphene") to navigate and interface with the web design.

[etech-peter]

Website usability is not just about making sure everything on the site works, but how quickly and easily visitors are able to make use of the site.

[LazyJim]

not bad everyone, the reason I asked is some people assumed the wrong meaning, and some posted questions here about the wrong things.

I think perhaps it is mostly people that did not respond that needed the most help.

etech-peter has made an important distiction between if it works and how easy it is to use. It's the difference between a tool's capacity to do a job and its capacity to be employed. Sure a video recorder can record your favourite show while your're away on holiday, but can you program it to do so?

Both to conceive and evaluate your design you must know who the user is (users are). Simply because different people will find some things easier than others. (And can your gran program the video recorder?)

Assuming you don't know exactly who will be using your product over its life-time, generally you group all the people that might use it into segments to reprasent a cross-section of your user-base / target market. This approximation avoids trying to think about potentially millions of users while keeping a good range of target users in mind.

If we look in Wikipedia we see that also you have to consider what the user might want to do with your product, and design/evaluate for many different user-segments using each (or a relevant selection) of the expected (sensible or intended) uses.

Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcomics

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object's perceived efficiency or elegance.

In human-computer interaction and computer science, usability usually refers to the elegance and clarity with which the user interface of a computer program or a web site is designed. The term is also used often in the context of products like consumer electronics, or in the areas of communication, and knowledge transfer objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help). It can also refer to the efficient design of a mechanical objects such as a door handle or a hammer.

Accessability and usability are related, they are both part of erganomics (the relationship between user and tool). Accessibility could be called the most basic form of usability, but usually in web sites it refers to the underlying code not the interface itself - so I prefer to think of it as a pre-requisite to usability.

Anyway hopefully this will help some people, although I doubt the worst will be here reading it anyway! (By the worst I mean people who post irrelevant stuff on this part of the forum).

[tspike]

To me, designing a site to be usable doesn't mean taking your best stab at what you think a user would like, it means actually consulting with the users. It means empirically studying what works and what doesn't for a given audience. Conduct surveys, log data, try out different things and see what yields the best results. If you don't have time to empirically study things, at least check out competitors' sites and see if you can figure out why they placed things where they did, and see if there's a common, unifying theme between competitors. Or read some of the literature on the subject to see if you can apply some heuristics to the problem.

Basically, if you're out to innovate and make things more usable, you're never going to get it right on the first try even if it's your best guess. You need to conduct studies. If you're just out to make your site as usable as your competitors', go with what's tried and true.

[vtechno42]

Usability is, to me, a system by which humans interface with all manner of technology. The less usable a tool or website is, the more machine-like it is, or the less "organic" it feels. And countering that ofcourse, the more usable something is, the more it just fits the intended user of it like a glove, seemlessly integrating their needs and desires into the technology that can facilitate them.

The more time spent actually DOING something the way you envisioned, versus fighting the damned thing into doing it the way you want it to, is time well-spent.

[LazyJim]

tspike gives much needed and solid advice!
No-one does this enough, I know I don't, and form the evidence on the web... I'm not alone.
but that's not an excuse!

Originally Posted by vtechno42

The more time spent actually DOING something the way you envisioned, versus fighting the damned thing into doing it the way you want it to, is time well-spent.

Well put!

Everyone please note though, this section of the forum is primarily focused on making your web sites (or web applications...) easier to use, not for helping you install your forum or whatever!

[vtechno42]

Originally Posted by LazyJim

Well put!

Everyone please note though, this section of the forum is primarily focused on making your web sites (or web applications...) easier to use, not for helping you install your forum or whatever!

Thanks Jim... so I guess I can't wax codepoetic about my database-driven excel spreadsheets? *sniffle* They're simply beautiful... the 8th wonder of my world.

[LazyJim]

well not really :p maybe you could do over at the coding forum though, or the off-topic forum lobby

[waffles]

Usability for a website means that it takes me about 2 seconds to figure out where I want to go. It doesn't necesarily mean that I know where everything leads however. I know, that sounds a bit off. But let's look at it like this.

There's a section on a clan site just for clan members and the link is a phrase that everyone in the clan thinks is funny. If I'm not in the clan I won't get the link. But that's not somewhere I want to (or in this case can) go anyway.

[dcole07]

I would say how easy everything is to the user and making sure everything looks correct in any case!

[jackmotine]

Long, long ago, I recall a fellow called Jakob suggesting that once your masterpiece was pretty well done, you grabbed a couple of living breathing people and sat them down at a PC with your site loaded. Tell them to explore that site. Then you watch. Note the stumbles and hesitations, then fix the points of confusion.

Repeat the exercise with another 3 warm-blooded humans.

After making the changes required this time you will have a far greater understanding of usability, and a site that's better than 90% of those out there.

Let me tell you - it's an uncomfortable expreience!

Jack

[vtechno42]

Originally Posted by jackmotine

Long, long ago, I recall a fellow called Jakob suggesting that once your masterpiece was pretty well done, you grabbed a couple of living breathing people and sat them down at a PC with your site loaded. Tell them to explore that site. Then you watch. Note the stumbles and hesitations, then fix the points of confusion.

I used to work to work in market research, these kinds of studies are called (obviously enough) usability studies. I've worked for the biggest and best. I'd say in that case, it's better when someone else does the testing and administration of the study. Client bias can get in the way of seeing the buildings for the mortars and bricks.... and hell, they can take it or leave it, they paid for the usability testing, we did it, whether they like what they hear and actually DO anything about it is their own business.

[LazyJim]

Discussion is getting better still

There's a general consensus that actual testing is vital, both to individual projects and to helping you learn.

This is all very well but what's the best way to do the best job you can prior to testing?
Suggestions would by especially important to those projects where usability studies stretch the budget, you don't want to waste time money and effort finding out things that you didn't need actual testing to find out!

[vtechno42]

Originally Posted by LazyJim

This is all very well but what's the best way to do the best job you can prior to testing?
Suggestions would by especially important to those projects where usability studies stretch the budget, you don't want to waste time money and effort finding out things that you didn't need actual testing to find out!

With the limitless possibilities of the internet, one must also take heed that having the most unique site may also mean that one could also have the most mindbogglingly frustrating site to use.

Some specific examples are hard for me to note 'cause I don't frequently use site that don't make sense and I usually don't bookmark them either, so I'll have to be general. (EDIT: Also, if I mentioned specific sites I've worked for that totally botched it prior to usability testing, I would be breaching confidenciality agreements.)

Sites that I've seen that are programmed entirely in Flash usually don't end up making much sense. Flash is an artist's language. That's good! It definately has its uses. But it's also more often misused as the entire infrastructure of a website... let's be honest, artists are often completely crazy! I'm an artist myself, so I feel like I'm fully qualified to call myself a total whackjob.

The type of site I think of when I refer to "sites completely programmed in flash" are the kind with ethereal floating nav, annoying sounds on mouseover, and swanky-looking pageloads/transitions that ultimately end up wasting the user's time.

So here are a few geneic examples of what to avoid when trying to make usable flash sites.

Mouse-over scrollers are senseless for usability. Who wants to sit there for a billion hours while a thesis scrolls by at 3 pixels per second? Nobody. I know proper scrollbars are a nightmare in flash because I've tried to program one myself. IT'S TOUGH! But getting by with a clunky "second-best" isn't worth pissing off your userbase.

Nav should be consise, easy to opperate and simple to understand. If it's too artsy (like maybe links orbiting around a glowing nucleus attached to little lines, and then labeled "Base" for home, "Shout" for contact, and "Outer Limits" for links), it makes for a highly frustrating user experience just to get from Page A to Page B. It may be increadibly awesome looking, but unless you're pandering to all those poor kids with A.D.D., you may want to do away with the gliss in the Nav.

Uhm... yeah, that's all I have for now. Maybe I shoulda posted this in the "beef" thread too, aye?