Usability: Why should I care?

Without a backend it won’t run. Without advertising it won’t get hits. Without visual design it won’t be attractive. With all of these pressures, why should you care about usability?

Because usability is at its worst a necessity and at its best a competitive advantage.

In a world where starting up a new site or online service is getting easier all the time, you cannot afford to have users annoyed with your interface. Your site can be a new paradigm of synergistic artistry or have more features than a Swiss Army Knife with an inferiority complex; but Google is more than happy to take users to your competitors with the press of a button. If it’s not usable, it’s not better.

Usability makes the product fit the users. Thinking about users keeps you from designing products for multi-child families in China; or expecting teens to use faceted search. Unless you happen to be designing a product to be used only by yourself, you have to assume that users will have different levels of knowledge and different expectations. Working with these needs and pre-established patterns of action in mind will let you make your design intuitive, and show you where to offer support when you need to try something daring.

Finally, usability best practices are most powerful when implemented early in the design cycle. Once your product is live, user feedback means either kludges or expensive redesigns (or just ignoring the problem). And the users who actually give feedback are the helpful ones. For every user who bothers to tell you about a problem, there are many more who just shrug and walk away (or tell their friends how useless your site is). Any problem that reaches this stage is an expensive one.

So design for usability while testing early and often. Your bottom line will thank you.