What is usability, and why is it crucial to the success of your product?
5 aspects of usability that define how usable your products are
Usability is a subjective and qualitative measure that describes how easy it is for people to use a product. The easier it is to use the product, the better it is for our user/customer. It is frequently confused with User Experience, while usability is one aspect of User Experience.
Even though the product is not easy to use, it would still be used by the user/customer because of specific conditions. A surveyor, for example, is required to utilize specific GPR equipment to identify underground utilities. It may be challenging to use, but they will continue to use it since they have to, unless another product is available that is simpler to use.
How can we tell if our product is already usable?
It is difficult to tell whether the product is already usable since it is a subjective and qualitative measurement. The Subjectiveness of usability depends on the user. In the previous example, a senior surveyor perhaps will think that the device is usable but not for junior surveyors with their limited experience.
To cover this up, Interaction Design Foundation defines five factors that we may use to determine whether our product is usable. There are effective, efficient, error tolerant, engaging, and easy to learn. Let’s dive into it:
✅ Effective
An effective product helps their user to complete their task (eg: playing music) with high accuracy (error minimal) so they could achieve their goals (eg: Listen to Super Shy by New Jeans). Tana, a note-taking app, delivers a good experience in writing bullet list notes. It does the job with minimal error.
⏳ Efficient
Achieving goals without wasting effort, cost and time is what we called efficient. Combining Effective & Efficient would give a delightful experience to our users. Take a look at Framer for example, it is only two clicks away from publishing our website!
🚨 Error Tolerant
No matter how good our product is, the possibility of errors occurring on our product is always around because we have no control over how users utilize our product. What we could control is how our product worked. As Digital Product Designers, we must reduce the possibility of errors for the product to be effective and efficient. One example is when we make an account on any site and get “helper” text telling us that we need to fulfill certain password requirements.
✨ Engaging
We could increase this value with aesthetic visual design or even use gamification on our product. Duolingo utilizes gamification to make language learning more enjoyable and less difficult or stressful than traditional methods.
🎓 Easy to Learn
Users will abandon a product that is difficult to use because they find themselves unable to use it. We may create onboarding, tutorials, or design a familiar product for our users to simplify their learning curve. Threads feel familiar for Twitter (now known as X) users. This allows them to understand how to use Threads quickly.
So, why is usability important?
Products with good usability will help user to achieve their goal with ease. The higher usability is, the higher user retention and satisfaction rate of the product. Products that give their user satisfaction could influence them to recommend our product to other people. Hence, Good usability means sustainable and viable product business.
🔑 Takeaways
- Usability is one of the key factors in User Experience that measures how easy it is for users to utilize our product.
- It is a qualitative and subjective parameter that is greatly affected by the users. As a result, having a solid understanding of who our user is could have a significant impact on the product’s usability.
- We might evaluate the usability of our product by looking at its effectiveness, efficiency, error tolerance, how engaging it is to use, and shallow learning curve.
- Because an unusable product will be abandoned by the user, it has become an essential aspect of the sustainability and viability of a business.
Further reading
Thank you for reading my story this far 😁. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
