Ease of use – to the detriment of user experience?

User experience is, according to Wikipedia, "used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system". I think this is a fairly decent definition, and will be the one I use for the purposes of this post.

Usability is, according a definition derived from Nigel Bevan,"the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment."

These two thing clearly overlap: a product or service with great usability is likely to translate into a good user experience. But what of sub-optimal outcomes – products or services that do not achieve perfect usability (that is, every product and service ever produced)? What are the trade-offs between usability/user experience, and ease-of-use?

The question can be more clearly phrased using an example. Imagine a complex software product, providing computational capabilities that no comparable software product can achieve. The managers of the company producing this product need to provide an update to keep ahead of their competitors. They have limited resources. Should they:

(a) apply all their resources to enhancing the algorithms to provide better results, or
(b) apply some of their resources to enhancing the algorithms and some to making the product quicker and easier to use

Easy, right? (b)? I guess that's what many people would say. Making a complicated, difficult, unwieldy product will increase support costs, put some people off buying the software, make the documentation more difficult and expensive to write, and so on. All of this is true. It's also true that if the developers think with more of a user-focus at the outset, then the product will be better to use without any additional resource.

But still, from a user experience point of view, (a) might be better than (b). It all depends on your user. If your users are all (or mostly) demanding better computational results over all others, then their user experience – their overall experience and satisfaction when using the product – is likely to be better with the more functional product than with a slightly less functional product that they can learn and use faster. Of course, if they can't get the results that the product is capable of, their user experience will be poor whatever.

The conclusion of this, I think, is that "satisfaction" is the key word in both the definitions. Something cannot be usable unless it satisfies the needs of its users, and neither can it provide a good user experience. And in order to provide satisfaction, we must "know our users". A product that's nasty to use will depress and upset most user experience professionals, but on a given day it may still be the best experience we can deliver.

User Experience definition
A paper by Nigel Bevan (discussing how usability can be approached from a quality perspective, but discussing how user satisfaction can be considered, measured, and tested)

User testing - is it worth it, and should we tell anyone if it's not?

I was sent an interesting article today, written in 1998 by Jacobsen, Hertzum, and John. It's hardly brand new, but it addresses something that doesn't seem to be addressed often elsewhere.

Their thesis, based on an experiment they carried out, is that the number of evaluators you have of the evidence collected from a user test is (at least) as important as the number of users. That is, more evaluators will find many more issues from exactly the same evidence, and the way they classify the issues they find is very varied. Evaluating, they suggest, is a very subjective process.

Taking into account other evidence that calls into question the classic '5 users = 80% of issues' equation (one study found issues being reported at the same rate at the 16th user), is user testing a valid, cost-effective thing to be doing? Will we really gain wisdom this way? And, if not, what are the consequences of telling those decision-makers not sold on usability that the most high-profile method is dogged with difficulty?

From looking at the evidence, it seems to me that there a few factors still supporting user testing:

1. Nielsen's quote that "The most striking truth . . . is that zero users give zero insights."
2. Most of the problems reported are down to loose definitions.
3. Evidence still suggests that properly organised and controlled user testing yields great results.

So the challenge seems to be:

• define the study properly
• choose your users carefully
• brief your evaluators comprehensively (and use more than 1)

If we do these things, I think user testing still has a central important role to play in improving user experience.

Jacobsen, Hertzum, and John's paper
Jakob Nielsen on 5 users
CHI 2003, a panel discussion on the number-of-users problem

Intuitive - a word much abused?

'Intuitive' is a word you hear a lot. Sometimes it's users telling you that they think something is, or isn't, intuitive, sometimes it's people on the fringes of usability endeavours suggesting ways that interfaces could work more intuitively.

More often than I can believe, it's skilled and experienced usability professionals.

It is, in many ways, a holy grail to produce 'intuitive' interfaces and experiences - that is, interfaces that require no reasoning or learning through observation. Whether there is, or ever can be, an 'intuitive' interface is a point for discussion.

This is not merely semantics though - it is not merely that the word is used without proper reference to its meaning that I object to. It is that it gives the impression that interfaces, and interaction in general, can be designed in such a way as not to require:

1. Learning
2. Reasoning

This is problematic in that it leads designers to overlook the need to understand people's mental models - the things they've already learnt during their lives, the way they make sense of the world.

It is through understanding how people's minds work that we can best work towards 'intuitive' interfaces. And people's minds work differently across education groups, skill sets, cultures, experience, and so on. By using the word intuitive, we overlook the need to understand our users, and mistakenly assume that an interface is, or is not, intuitive.

I therefore suggest that the word is hereby banned from use in a user experience context, and that, instead, professionals describe what they actually mean.

Who's with me?

A couple of interesting links on this:

http://www.uie.com/articles/design_intuitive/
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/term_444.txl
http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

Welcome

Welcome to my blog.

This site will contain information (and, most probably, links to information) relevant to the fields of user-centred design and information architecture.

It'll be based on the things I'm working on (as a usability lead in technical communications) and things I'm thinking about (as a 'normal' guy, interested in how we use things and access information).

It won't be the most authoritative source on the web, by any means, but it might just link to some really great stuff.

I also hope to get into some interesting discussions with folks a bit brighter than my self too....