Usability process

Even when designers know the rules about making something easy to use (and they should), its still too easy to get it wrong. Creating a product or service that is obvious and intuitive to other people can be incredibly difficult. How do we always know what other people are thinking? We must actually involve them through research and testing.

Usability includes a range of success criteria, such as value, appropriateness, understandability, and effectiveness. Users are also customers, and a service needs to be primarily useful, something people want and need in the first place.

The usability process expert knows when and how to bring in user-involvement techniques to address these issues. There are techniques for inspiration to identify latent needs that could be met by the service, and for validation to test if those needs are met with the best possible solution.

- contextual research (also called field observation)
- beeper studies, video studies and surveys
- focus groups and interviews
- experience modelling
- card sorting
- expert or heuristic evaluation
- talk-aloud and metrics usability testing
- performance tracking

Usability process supplements business and marketing research processes, which don't always have the techniques to jump to experiential customer knowledge. All of them should be driven by the same goal - creating compelling and profitable customer engagements.