Usability Consulting

Usability Defined (adaped from Jakob Nielsen's useit.com and usability.gov)
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word "usability" also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.
Usability is defined by five quality components:

Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

There are many other important quality attributes. A key one is utility, which refers to the design's functionality: Does it do what users need? Usability and utility are equally important: It matters little that something is easy if it's not what you want. It's also no good if the system can hypothetically do what you want, but you can't make it happen because the user interface is too difficult. To study a design's utility, you can use the same user research methods that improve usability.

Why should I be interested?
Millions of Web sites offer users information, goods, services, and entertainment. But many of these sites are difficult to use, don't work properly, and ultimately don't attract or keep users. By following a usability engineering process, users' abilities to find information and satisfaction with Web sites improve significantly.

Is there data to support usability?
Research by User Interface Engineering, Inc., shows that people cannot find the information they seek on Web sites about 60 percent of the time. This can lead to wasted time, reduced productivity, increased frustration, and loss of repeat visits and money.

Users are impatient
According to Jakob Nielsen, "Studies of user behavior on the Web find a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow sites. People don't want to wait. And they don't want to learn how to use a home page. There's no such thing as a training class or a manual for a Web site. People have to be able to grasp the functioning of the site immediately after scanning the home page—for a few seconds at most."

How to Improve Usability
There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing, which has 3 components:

Get hold of some representative users, such as customers for an e-commerce site or employees for an intranet (in the latter case, they should work outside your department).
Ask the users to perform representative tasks with the design.
Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they have difficulties with the user interface. Shut up and let the users do the talking

It's important to test users individually and let them solve any problems on their own. If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you have contaminated the test results.

To identify a design's most important usability problems, testing 5 users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it's a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them. Iterative design is the best way to increase the quality of user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with users, the better.

User testing is different from focus groups, which are a poor way of evaluating design usability. Focus groups have a place in market research, but to evaluate interaction designs you must closely observe individual users as they perform tasks with the user interface. Listening to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do.

How We Can Help
JWB Services has experianced Usability Consultants in house, that can provide you with the training and experiance to provide your organization with all manner of usability services. Services include: