Hello! My name is Taylor Regan, I design User Experiences.

This is an important question to ask, but I wonder how often it gets answered and answered well enough to convince executives and managers why usability is imperative to putting out a quality product, while also saving the business time and money.

“ A bad web site is like a grumpy salesperson.”

- Jakob Nielsen

Before we dive into the benefits of usability, let’s take a moment to consider how Customer-centered design incorporates usability and marketing.  Customer-centered design builds upon user-centered design in that it focuses on the synthesis of business and marketing objectives with usability objectives.  For instance, a traditional brick and mortar business might have “increase online revenues and build brand awareness” as their main online business and marketing objectives.  The usability objectives to help support these overall business objectives might be “decrease shopping cart abandonment rate by reducing the number of steps involved with finalizing a purchase.”    Some executives and managers might say, “usability is just common sense.”  WRONG.

“Because every person knows what he likes, every person thinks he is an expert on user interfaces.”

-Paul Heckel, 1982

In The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition),the authors discuss 9 myths of Customer-centered Design.

1. Good design is just common sense
2. Only experts create good designs
3. Web interfaces can be redesigned right before launch
4. Good design takes too long and costs too much
5. Good design is just cool graphics
6. Web interface guidelines will guide you to good designs
7. Customers can always rely on documentation and help
8. Market research takes care of understanding all customer needs
9.Quality assurance groups make sure that web sites work well

Be on the look out for these.

“ If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.”

- Susan Dray

Usability is important because of its benefits and its benefits support your users AND your business.

The Benefits of Usability*:

1. Increased productivity

Usability evaluation methods and testing help increase productivity by pinpointing problems, identifying areas of opportunity and implementing solutions that streamline user tasks to make interactions seamless.  If a piece of software is difficult to use, then your employees will burn through time on a daily basis trying to understand the software.  This in turn will cost you significant amounts of money in wasted work hours on an annual basis.  If a website is difficult to use, then you’re not just losing revenue on purchases from potential customers, you’re also building a bad name for your brand.  Don’t force your users to conform to your digital technology, make your digital technology conform to them.  Get to know your audience and involve them in the design process early on by performing usability testing.

2. Decreased training and support costs

If users are involved throughout the design process, then the system will be much easier to use and there will be less of a need for extravagant training or high costs associated with customer service.  Just like the title of Steven Krug’s book  Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition, if you have to have someone explain everything to your users, then why not save yourself the time and money by letting your users help inform the design itself?

3. Increased sales and revenues

Make it easy to find, easy to purchase and leave a lasting impression that will keep them coming back for more.  How do you do this?  Get to know your users and know that you are not your users.  You are not designing for your product manager, your CEO, your VP … you are designing for the end user, your audience, your potential customer.  “When I go online I expect to be able to do ….”  “When I use this system, it needs to be able to do …”  Get rid of “I” in your discussions and meetings.  It’s not about you and how you would use it, it’s about how your users will use it.  Designing by committee can be the death of  a potentially compelling product.

4. Reduced development time and costs

Don’t let your development team waste time arguing about the best way to solve a design problem.  Save time and energy by going to the source.  Find the best solution by usability testing.  Whether it’s a paper or a low fidelity prototype, come up with some tasks and go and test it.  You only need to test between 4 to 6 users before you start to see the same recurring issues and presto … you now have identified the true source of the problem and have gotten feedback from users on potential solutions.

5. Reduced maintenance costs

Be sure to weigh the benefits and understand the true costs associated with technical debt.  If a product works as it should and meets the needs and goals of your users, then you will be saving yourself time and money from having to go back, redesign and fix what you have in production.

6. Increased customer satisfaction

Usability can help you create a good user experience and a good user experience is one that satisfies your users on the level of form, function and emotion.  The user experience is the brand experience.

Usability is important because of the benefits gained from balancing the needs of your users with the needs of your business.  I hope this helps answer this important question and provides you with some quality information for fostering a usability initiative within your company’s culture.

* the list of usability benefits were taken from the Usability Professionals’ Association website