Importance Of Usability And Product Development

Everyone knows of Apple, Inc's famous Macintosh, iPods and iPhone as boutique consumer

electronics items; if you're one of the Apple cognoscenti, you buy them, if you think of

them as overpriced items, you probably mock them. If you're doing product engineering or

web site development, there's a lot you can learn from them.

Apple products go through one of the most rigorous product usability testing regimes

imaginable, and much of the current state of the art in user interface design comes from

work that Apple did in the mid to late 1980s. For any company making a new product,

usability should be one of the key considerations.

Usability impacts the public acceptance of a product more so than features do, and more

so than its reliability or its price to value ratio. Consumers buy products to get the

benefits of using them, and usability is critical for this. As a case in point, while

TiVo is the industry standard Digital Video Recorder, it was not the first one on the

market. Both Panasonic and Sony had DVRs on the market two years before TiVo did. TiVo

won the battle for making the product associated with their brand because they made

theirs easier to use, and tied it to a subscription service that would track program

listings from cable and satellite TV companies to record things it thought you might

enjoy.

TiVo won because its engineers thought about the customer experience rather than the

technology. In a nutshell, usability testing is making sure that your product is usable

by people other than the engineers who designed them. Apple did the same with the MP3

player market, not because the iPod is a better MP3 player; the MP3 playback mechanism is

commodity silicon that costs pennies, and is shoved into thumb drives and wrist watches

at this point. Apple's integration of the iPod and the iTunes music store is what made

the iPod the dominant music player; Rio and Sony made MP3 players for five years before

Apple got into the market; Apple made an MP3 player that allows you to buy songs by the

track, and proved that people would pay for them.

Another recent win on product usability and testing is the Amazon Kindle. Amazon isn't

quite up there with TiVo and Apple on its usability, though its ability to encourage

impulse spending on books on the web site (and telling customers that if they buy one

more thing, they trigger free shipping) is a beautiful example of making a web site more

usable. However, Amazon learned from Apple that usability matters; the differences in

usability between the first Kindle and the new one out this year are subtle...but show a

lot of effort put into refining the places where customers complained about the first

iteration of the product. The buttons for next page and previous page were moved so that

they wouldn't get bumped accidentally. The product now comes with a protective sleeve;

the tactile feel of the keyboard buttons has been improved.

Which shows that usability isn't something you do at the end of the product's development

cycle. It's an ongoing process as you keep the product on the market. Now that you have

seen why it's important, we'll discuss methodologies for usability testing and ways to do

it effectively and inexpensively.


Christian Abad operates the leading
Website Usability Testing, Ecommerce Website

Design and Development company. Their services include
Ecommerce Website

Design ,
Ecommerce

Website Development