Tech Usability

If you ever visit an Asda or Tesco (other supermarkets are available), you might see a small number of self-service tills at the end. I guess the point of these tills is to make it quicker for the customer to pay for their goods, particularly if they only have a handful of items to pay for. But there’s one big problem with these tills which slows things down: they aren’t very useable.

A self-service till at Tesco. Image
by Cowfish

OK, before I go all out on the attack, the system does have some good points: the buttons are nice and big, which makes it quicker and easier to hit them (I’ll explain why in a future article); and I’ve certainly used worse touch screens in my life. But still; they’re annoying, and there are design elements that slows things down. Small things, like having the customer to press “Finish & Pay” before paying (why not just have the customer place the money into the slot?) and requiring every single item be ‘bagged’ (that is, be placed in the bagging area) before you continue to scan the next item and not letting you put your own bag on there.

Basically, usability matters — whether it’s on the web, or just some random piece of technology. It might be something small (like not requiring the customer press a button before paying), but it could make all the difference. Things should be simple and intuitive to use: in fact, I claim (perhaps wrongly) that if something is well designed then it shouldn’t need any kind of sign or copy with instructions for the user (there should be no need for ‘press here’ or ‘pull’). It should be a joy to use the product.

Of course, no designer has all the answers when it comes to intuitive design and knowing how the product will be used, which is why testing is so important. If you sit a prospective user down at a computer (and note that a prospective user is usually not the client!) and invite them to use the system, you will gain a lot of information about what you got right and what you got wrong, just by watching them. Do they keep going to the bottom of the page to look for your company’s contact information? That’s where you should put your company’s contact information. Many companies get usability wrong, by assuming that if a user doesn’t know how to use their system then they are clueless idiots, rather than the problem being with the software itself.

Note that customer support is a great method of getting user feedback! If you find out what the users are thinking by looking at error and access logs, watching out for general trends and habits, and actually inviting feedback (Get Satisfaction is a great tool for this), you’ll learn how to make your site more useable. Instead of going against the grain and telling the users how they should use the product, a good designer will help make it easier to use it in that way. A good example is Twitter‘s @replies. This started off as an unofficial way of replying to each other’s messages, and once the guys at Twitter noticed this trend they built in all sorts of features which uses the @reply.

So, in conclusion, usability is (in my opinion) one of the most important parts of any kind of product — be it a physical item, software, or a website. Users should be listened to, software and websites should be tested, and results should be implemented.

“[Design is] not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs