Guiding design decisions
Usability as a pillar quality component at Backbase
TL;DR
As digital designers our craft is constantly changing with the advancement of technology: new tools, devices, visual trends, engineering feasibility, etc. To avoid making decisions based on what’s most impressive and instead achieve truly useful products, we can define a set of fundamental design principles to guide our process.
It doesn’t matter whether you are designing a Native Mobile app, a small component or a responsive website, when building a digital product, new design challenges will arise, giving us the opportunity to innovate and experiment.
While pushing the bar forward is always a good idea, you have to remember that users turn to products or services to solve a particular problem in mind, so an experience based on usability will always bring you better results than making design choices based on look & feel. How something works is key to how much it will be used.
“User experience is the establishment of a philosophy about how to treat people” — Whitney Hess in Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX
Establishing an internal philosophy or set of values to guide your design decisions will remind you of what is most important for the user, and the experience you want to deliver, throughout the process of building your product.
At Backbase, when working directly with our clients, we place usability as one of the most important guiding principles. We believe usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use and the methods applied to improve ease-of-use during the design process.
The product we are building become useful when they provide the features the user needs (utility) while being easy and pleasant to use (usability).
“If something is usable -whether it’s a Web site, a remote control, or a revolving door- it means that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it’s worth”
— Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited. 2014. Page 9.
As a quick refresher, let’s review the quality components that define usability according to Nielsen Norman Group:
- Learnability
How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design? - Efficiency
Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks? - Memorability
When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency? - Errors
How many errors do users make, how severe these errors are and how easily can the recover from these errors? - Satisfaction
How pleasant is it to use the design?
At the beginning of a project we share this, as part of our design values, with stakeholders, internal teams and partners so our strategy is aligned in providing meaningful experiences to end users. It’s a great way to identify quick wins and the biggest pain points in an old system.
So far, we are pretty happy with the results.
Did you find yourself nodding while reading? Talk to us, we are hiring!
