Compete on Usability

Simplicity is not the ultimate goal

I saw a hotel telephone last week that perfectly illustrates one of my favorite themes: simple is not always more usable.
Here's a phone without any buttons. It doesn't get much simpler than that!  Yet most people wouldn't even consider it a real telephone, because essential features are missing. How do you choose who you want to call?

If a simple interface is your goal, it's critical to know the essential feature set. Simplify past a certain point, and you risk making your product or system unrecognizable. The best way to know the essential feature set is user research, although a survey of competitive products can substitute in the short term.

But wait, there's more!  Over time, the essential feature set increases for a given product.  Early phones used to come like this one, with no controls other than a crank to signal an operator to help you. These days, most people won't buy a phone without a display for caller ID, redial and  volume controls, and more.  Heck, wired phones can seem like a relic compared with the versatility of mobiles.

The ultimate goal is user satisfaction. Meet expectations by delivering the essential feature set, then delight users with a better, more usable interface on those features.

What will we do with cognitive surplus?

Bloggers I follow are buzzing about the Clay Shirky talk on the post-TV cognitive surplus.  I understood it as "Passive TV-style media is going away, replaced by the interactive Internet, and now we'll all use our free time being busy content creators."

His actual talk, however, was more nuanced and believable than a simple, en-masse transition of humanity from passive consumers to active creators.  He managed to address two shortcomings I predicted with cognitive surplus.

TV is fodder for social interaction. When my coworkers chat about the TV shows Lost or 30 Rock, I can't do much but smile and nod, because I watch very little TV. In the workplace, opting out of TV talk is a real sacrifice. In diverse contemporary society, what can you chat with people about, without risk of confusion or giving offense? It's just easier to have safe common experiences outside of work to talk about.

However, Shirky was careful to emphasize that even a small amount of redirected TV time could spawn multiple Wikipedias per year of Net content. If it only takes a little attention to contribute, it's easy to see people playing an online game or posting to an online community while watching TV. They're doing it now, all the time.

TV is rest time. People like being passive. Depending on what you read, television is either the world's most tranquilizing addiction, or a cognitively demanding cultural simulator. Either way, for a long time pundits doubted the PC would ever replace the TV, because peoples' behavior is quite different using these two mediums. No one "watches computer," and no one "uses TV." It's not easy to find exactly what the difference is. Supporting these naysayers, hybrid systems like WebTV and the Apple TV have had no great commercial success.

In the past ten years, though, television has evolved into convergence with personal computing.
Or rather, the TV interface, not the content, is much more like computers now. Tivo changed everything, and new TV sites like Hulu promise to change things further.

My take is that we still must make online content creation easier. It's great that people can watch less TV, but creating anything interesting online is still inconsistent and frustrating for most people. We need standardized widgets for common functions, so that every rich interface isn't a new learning experience for users. We must clearly communicate state in Web applications, so people always know what to expect from our tools. And we need very quick feedback and results when using these applications.

 

The paradox of the active user

I'm working on a project creating fun online tools for kids. One thing I noticed immediately in usability evaluations was that kids don't read anything.  They just charge forward clicking buttons and trying stuff out, until they get stuck and give up.  If only they would read the directions first!  Then they would know how to use the tools correctly.  No trial and error would be necessary.

The paradox of the active user is a great description of this common behavior.  Because people use software to get something done, they tend to immediately begin working towards those goals as soon as possible.  As Carroll and Rosson put it, "the typical pattern we have observed is that people simply strike out into the unknown." The paradox is that in some cases, people would finish tasks faster (and with less frustration) if they weren't so quick to get started.

Usability professionals must design for people who don't RTFM by putting instructions in context.  At the left is a link for a subset of the current MSN registration page. Instead of text exhorting the user to "make your password difficult to guess," or errors that pop up, MSN turns password creation into a game with their password strength meter.

Needs of the many, needs of the few

When thinking about interface design, one of my heuristics is to weight features by how likely they are to be useful to the target audience. You should know your audience, know what they're looking for, and ensure they can find it easily.

Relevancy seems like an obvious way to set up an interface's hierarchy, but product managers I've worked with often want to give the new features heavy visual weight, regardless of their relevance. This reflects less a user-centered view and more of an internal focus. A new feature represents effort, and naturally the company wants to give their new work every opportunity to be seen.

For example, imagine a product manager and a user experience person conversing:

PM: "Let's put a big link at the top of our homepage to our company's new investor site!"

UX: "Uh, don't forget, only a handful of site visitors really are interested in investor information. I checked over our competitors and very few have an Investors link anywhere on their home pages. It's not good to clutter our homepage with too many extraneous links."

PM: "Yeah, but it's just one link."

UX: "The problem is, we launch five similar new features a month, and they all want prominent placement just for being new. We risk drowning out the content most visitors want in a wall of links!" (Translation: this is failure for me.)

PM: "Well, what if people can't find our new investor info?" (Translation: this is failure for me.)

The product manager has a point here. Don't forget about "the needs of the few." Design for them by categorizing niche features in relevant places. Build a flexible design from the beginning, because whether your interface is for a website or for a software product, there will always be new features tacked on after the fact.

First, see what other, comparable websites do: for example, are users likely to find the investor info under a company's About Us section? Another options is to give the feature temporary or rotating prominent placement. Some websites might give investor info extra prominence every financial quarter or every year, when visitors are most likely to be seeking it.

The Customer is Never Dumb

Call an event "just a dumb mistake" or "human error," and you can expect glares and lectures from usability professionals. It's equivalent to telling a teacher "those who can, do, those who can't, teach."

If you've ever been on the receiving end of this cliche, be aware most people do believe in something called "human error" that excuses most "dumb" mistakes. I agree with the field's orthodox opinion that users are never simply dumb.

Instead, they are:

• Busy and multitasking. Your users often will be in a context where they must multitask -- this is otherwise known as "real life." To minimize dumb mistakes, reduce your interface's demands on their attention. List information in familiar ways. Supply everything needed to complete a task on the same page. Consider interruptions: for example, can your users recover from a phone call and still complete their tasks?
• Overloaded with information. Dumb mistakes can result from too many choices, so take care to only show a reasonable amount of relevant info at once. It's not enough to just say "let the user choose." You have to know your users' needs, and design for them a limited number of intelligent choices.
• Hardwired for speed. Humans evolved to make decisions rapidly. Your users are information predators. They'll scent out your relevant links and functions and try them quickly, but they'll be just as quick to lose interest and try something else if the scent disappears. When your workflow includes clear hints at every step, you'll keep users' attention on what's relevant to them.

You want your interface to make users feel smart. Fast. Effective. If your interface makes users feel like "human errors" instead, well who's dumb then?

Build As I Do, Not As I Say

Here's another problematic quote usability practitioners are used to hearing from clients.

"We don't need usability because we listen closely to our customers and build the features they need, the way they want them."

This viewpoint is prevalent in the enterprise software market. When a customer is worth thousands or millions of dollars, it's very difficult for a business to turn down their feature ideas! Building to customer request seems user-centric and laudable, but often, it's a philosophy leading to expensive, unusable designs.

Instead of building to customer wishlists, focus on what your customers actually do. If they request a new feature, interview them carefully to understand why they want it. You may find that a different type of feature would meet their needs even better. Customers may be adept at what they do, but they're not likely to be interface experts. You must listen to their suggestions, but hear their goals and address those goals with good, usable design.

Sometimes, the feature customers want is one they already have. Consider Microsoft Office. The recent 2007 release concentrated on user interface since, in a customer survey, 90% of requested new features already existed, hidden in the software interface.

How does MySpace win?

The social networking site MySpace.com is a polarizing force among design and usability advocates. There are certain aesthetic principles that ought to be universal, so how can MySpace be so ugly, so difficult to use, and yet remain so popular?

Let's get some of the less satisfactory explanations out of the way:

• It's just a fad. Well, MySpace visits keep increasing.  Its popularity may not last forever, but what does?
• Kids don't know what's good. Tell that to Nike, Burger King,  or Apple. Style and brand are extremely important to teenagers.
• Teenagers follow their friends, and rebel against what adults value. These cliches don't explain why MySpace topped other websites built for rebellious youth.

I'm not sure anyone has definitively established the secret to MySpace's success, but here are a few partial explanations that make sense to me:

• Believe it or not, it's user-centered design. MySpace has focused on the features their target audience wants, and better site design or nicer-looking templates simply aren't on the list.
• "I'm with the band." When you're talking about the American Idol, Paris Hilton generation, nothing is more important than being famous. MySpace optimized itself for musicians to set up websites, and their fans join just to watch for concert photos, score free tracks, and hope that a rock star will respond to their comments.
• It's a mess, just like a teenager's bedroom. MySpace may not be intuitive or easy to use, but it is extremely flexible, allowing all the garish colors, bizarre pictures, and trend-of-the-moment videos its users want to post.
• It doesn't put on airs. It seems odd that the main website, at least, doesn't have a better design. But that's a strength for MySpace because it keeps them close to their audience of enthusiastic non-designers. 

Digital rights management

There's a simple strategy to integrating digital rights management with your products such that it doesn't negatively affect user experience: Don't use it at all.

Usability issues have been documented in blogs and news articles, but businesses that know their users should have expected these problems. For most consumers, nothing in their experience helps them relate to music files that play only on certain players, or e-books readable only on one computer. Their mental model is the compact disc, which every modern stereo can play, or the print book, which can be lent or resold at will. People don't relate to renting or licensing content. They buy it, and they want to use it as they see fit.

What makes technology attractive is the promise that it will make things faster, easier, cheaper, and better. DRM breaks this promise. True, it was introduced to many media because people were copying and stealing the content. Yet over time this is becoming less of a problem. Hundreds of millions of dollars in Apple iTunes revenue argues that most people will not copy digital music if there's an easy, inexpensive way to purchase it.

While businesses large and small see the importance of DRM-free content to satisfying their customers, it's unfortunate that American colleges and universities are knuckling under. These days, fear of liability prods these institutes into deals with vendors to deliver DRM-crippled music. If you're in business like these, get used to swimming upstream forever, fighting customers' expectations and mental models.

Don't make your products too simple

Many people equate usability with simplicity. Their premise is, "If we just make it look simpler, people will use it more." Simplicity is the current trend in Web interfaces, going back to the Google homepage and forward to Web 2.0 interfaces like Twitter and Basecamp.

If it's not right for your business, feel free to buck this trend!  People do not buy simple, they buy feature-rich. Recall also the first commandment of usability and know your audience. Products built for novices can be simple, but the same interface may turn experts off.

If your audience leans towards one end of the novice-expert continuum, that must guide your interface design.  Experts need interfaces that are powerful but complicated, while novices need simple, step-by-step interfaces. In between is a broad middle ground of users who are unhappy to sacrifice capability for ease of use.

In general, you want to find the correct balance of simplicity for your interfaces, by experimenting, testing, and building to your audience. Realize that in most cases users expect a certain learning curve to achieve competency. Finally, a balance between ease of use and features also can help you maximize revenue.

Usability ROI: metrics aren't enough

Does your boss tell you, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it?" One of the reasons usability doesn't mesh with business at some companies is that it can be difficult to quantify the benefits of good usability. In response, usability gurus have spilled barrels of virtual ink trying to transform usability's qualitative nature into something closer to Six Sigma. One hundred percent ROI on average, they trumpet!

I find these arguments don't survive examination. Face it, websites differ so much in their audiences, tasks and business models that it seems ridiculous to average out their usability ROI. Now, there are all kinds of metrics to quote related to usability, such as time on task, task completion rate, and user satisfaction. However, only rarely can these metrics can be generalized, or compared directly across product lines.

In addition, many companies (especially those where usability is new) are not  interested in running careful studies and analysis that exclude all other factors. So often, a usability professional must contend with vectors like content updates, marketing spend and seasonal differences all contributing to a before / after analysis.

I have mixed feelings about usability ROI. If your higher-ups insist on you proving it, chances are they're already biased against funding usability. There's better return on your time by emphasizing qualitative benefits along with the numbers:

• Positive customer experiences strengthen your brand.
• Having a usability group helps sales and marketing promote products.
• Don't forget user experience: the overall delightful quality of the user's involvement with your company, offline and on, transcends narrow usability metrics.