In this article, I want to dive into what is usability ?

Making sure that a product is easy to use for everyone, whatever the physical and mental context they are in (physically impared, on the move, novice, …). Doing so that it’s really clear to people what there are supposed to do next, how they manage to get the task done that they need to be done.

Usability = ability to use a product with ease

From a design perspective, what are the top 5 important things that my customer must be able to do on my app or on my website, you want them to be able to do that without much though, without much frustration and be able to easily complete those activities/tasks.

Usability does not just apply to digital product but also to physical product because everything has usability.

For example weight scale is an interesting product to think of. An analog scale will be easy to use, you step on it and it shows your weight. A digital scale could add more complexity (multiple modes, buttons, …). Usability is much more frequently though in digital product because these product are more complex because they have computer build into it.

You can think about usability everyday when you use doors to enter somewhere. Sometimes doors are a really big example at poor usability. Did you never get frustated when you push a door to open it instead of pulling it and you never know what is the right way ?

This usability issue is also called “Norman door”. It’s when a design tells you to do the opposite of what you are actually supposed to do or give a wrong signal and need a sign to correct it. Named after Don Norman, professor of cognitive sciences and author of “Design of everyday things” and “Emotional Design”, both must read books for UX designers.

Although, usability is not new, there is a all industry of people thinking about designing product that are easy to use for people. You can think of industrial design, the design thinking movement and sort of philosophy.

UX vs. Usability

The question frequently asked is how Usability is different from User experience ?

These two terms are often hard to differentiate as usability has a lot evolve these last 5-10 years and has gain in importance in the designing digital products.

Sticking to its definition, usability is just how easy a product is to use, this is the core of usability.

But when we think of how to use a product, there is a lot more about the experience that come with it and this is why the term user experience has really caught on in attention.

At one point, CX (customer experience) was mentionned in some role description of company. CX tend to have a broader approach of user experience by evaluating how the customer is interacting at a brand level opposed to just the use of a digital product. CX or UX, it’s the same goal: Answer the question “Is there a reason for your user to use your product?”. Usability in all of this is just one aspect of how to improve the user/customer experience.

Usefulness, enjoyment, accessibility, etc, are aslo talked about when we think about user experience than just usability.

When we perform a usability test which is one of many UX methods, we observe how a specifc task is easy to get done. That’s also why these two terms are frequently hard to differenciate. They are intricated.

Usability vs. Accessibility

If usability is about how people interact with your product and can easily accomplish tasks with it, accessibility is whether or not they can access to the content or the features of your product that can allow them to accomplish something. These two components are deeply connected because if you can’t access features of a product you can’t use it.

There are two criteria you need to evaluate when you want to make sure a product is easy to use for everyone. For example, if you are on a phone and you have a poor signal strengh, you can’t access to a website or to a feature of a website fast enough. That hurt the usability because you can’t even get there to use it.

Importance of Usability

Sometimes when user get confused on how to use a product, we want to blame them by saying “He’s a novice at internet”, “It’s his fault to not understand, it’s obvious”.

As designers, it’s our role to make sure users know how to use our products. A lot of frustration can come down when using a product with poor usability and it might cause to loose our user.

To conclude, if you need to explain usability to your grand-parents or someone waiting to take its flight, you can boil it down to this expression from the famous book of Steve Krug : “Don’t make me think”.