Usability & Usefulness – two key principles

In the design and development of websites, usability and usefulness may appear to be similar terms, but they are related to different aspects of the design and development process. Usefulness is concerned with improving the relevance of the website to the user as they are completing a task, whereas usability is concerned with improving the ease of use of the website.

By improving the usefulness of a website, the user will find the information and functionality provided by the website to be relevant to the task at hand and this helps to increase the user’s expectations and satisfaction with using the website. The quality of the website content is a critical factor in determining the usefulness of a website. When writing content for your website, it is important to bear in mind; who is the target audience for website and what does this audience want and expect from the website?

In simple terms, if the site’s content is written in simple and easy to understand terminology with short sentences for the intended audience and the appropriate management process is used to keep the information content current; on the balance of probabilities, the website will register high marks for usefulness.

Usability is….

Usability is focused on designing the website to be easy to use. So, irrespective of whether the website is relevant, the key question for assessing usability is; does the user find using the website to be a chore or a joy? There are a number of well known pointers for improving website usability including;

• Ensuring that the user knows where they are on a website as they are browsing
• Ensuring that the user is able to find information quickly, given that people scan rather than read content on a website
• Format the content to be self evident to the user as they scan, to minimise the amount of thinking that they have to do
• If the user should get into some bother on the website, there should be an immediate facility to inform about the problem and offer a means of recovery

Seek to understand the user’s requirements

By adopting best practices for usability and usefulness at the start of a website project, rather than as a bolt-on or an extra testing phase towards the end of the project, designers and developers can get a better understanding of the user’s requirements and ultimately deliver a better solution.

Understanding user's requirements

Supplement these principles with some of the following questions and the designers and developers are well on the way to understanding the user’s requirements;

1. What is the user attempting to accomplish in terms of specific tasks and goals in their work?
2. What information does the user require from the website to progress their work and what’s the format that they would prefer to work with?
3. What set of features does the user require from this website?
4. What are the user’s expectations about how the website will work?

Importantly, given the user’s profile in terms of skills and experience, how can a website better assist the user in problem solving, learning and memory related tasks during their work routine?

As you can gather from the above questions, this approach encompasses quantifiable items such as tasks and goals in addition to qualitative aspects such as a user’s personality and their problem solving style.

Thoughts on an appropriate project management approach to implement these principles of usability and usefulness for websites and web apps will feature soon.