Compete on Usability

Graphing? Use labels, not legends

Which is more usable, a graph like this, with a legend or key?

Or one like this, with the lines labeled?

There are at least two reasons why labels are better than legends.  First, when the labels are on the chart, users don't have to look back and forth to interpret the lines. Labels are better in almost all cases. An exception might be when the graph is too crowded to fit the labels (the example above is pushing it). Of course, you might just be graphing too much data in a small space.

To illustrate the second reason labels are more usable, consider the graph in grayscale.


If the graph were printed on a black-and-white printer, or viewed by a user with color-deficient vision, they'd be unsure how to match the key with the lines.

Legends are the rule in business because Microsoft Excel inserts them automatically into graphs. In this case, resist accepting the default. Use dedicated graphing software with your data, or just edit your Excel graph to label each series on the chart.

Usability, shared resources, and "ownership"

Who "owns" the user experience at your company?  Marketing?  Product?  No one?

The single most important factor in usability success is not the expertise of your team, the market you're in, or even how well you know your users. It's your business process.  Gather user requirements before starting design, integrate usability early in your development cycle, and feed user input back into the process to start anew for the next version.

To get the most out of usability, it's something that ought to be on everyone's mind. Your marketing and sales groups need to consider it just as product design and development do. So evangelize, post up diagrams and articles, frame personas ... whatever it takes to make your peers think about usability!

 

Root cause analysis

Fixing problems fast is valued at every company I've worked with. With usability, however, it's important to first identify the correct problem to solve. Root cause analysis is one methodology I use to help identify the true source of usability problems.

Root cause analysis can be easy because, basically, you just keep asking Why? until you cannot ask any more. Here is an example:

Our company is not converting enough prospects on our website. Why?
Many users are not completing the signup questionnaire. Why?
Users don't answer all the signup questions because the questions seem too invasive. Why?
They do not understand that we use the answers to customize product features to them. Why?
They do not read the explanatory messaging on the signup page. Why?
The messaging is not in close enough proximity to the questions.

Without root cause analysis, the company may have tried to solve the problem by removing questions and dumbing down product functionality. They might have improved their conversion, but only at the cost of making their product less functional and competitive.

Often, root cause analysis can be simple, but in many cases, there is more than one root cause for a problem. Also, be sure to continue digging into the problem until you are truly at the root cause. Watch out for answers that tell you how to fix a problem now, but not how to prevent them in the future -- a hint that you have not yet found the root cause.  In the example above, perhaps there is a reason why the messaging was not put close to the questions.

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.