It is used as a throw-around term on development projects and often not paid much heed. Too many organizations are still using that dreaded term UAT. User acceptance testing? As in “let’s build a piece of crap and hope to buddah that those dumb users will accept what we’ve done”. Sadly, though usability principles have been around forever (c’mon: ergonomics, user-centered design, good design) people continue to ignore them. It’ll end up costing you (er, the company) a lot less money if you can incorporate usability early and often into the development lifecycle.Employing usability activities - yep, that’s right, talk to those users about what it is being created - will point you in the direction of making fewer mistakes. The fewer design rabbit-holes followed the shorter and better quality development will occur. I promise.

There are lots of statistics on the savings attributed to usability (see: Jakob Nielsen’s Alert box).Or do the metrics yourself. Work effort + software cost = development cost. The variable in this equation is work effort. Usability helps developers work better by asking the business analysts on the team to flesh out their design more thoroughly before any deliverables make it to the developers. On one project of mine consultants from McKinsey spent a year doing their work. They also tried to develop a GUI (in a vacuum, without users input). I could tell that it was a nightmare. The GUI looked like a yardsale: crap everywhere. They had interviewed users for their research but never put a GUI or performed any usability testing to validate the expression of the requirements. When I put their bad design in front of some users (the same ones already talked to) it became very clear very quickly that doing some more design work was required. A lot of work already done could have been skipped right over if only they had done simple usability exercises: card sorts, HTML prototyping, paper protytping. Anything would have helped.

There are plenty of examples of companies that do pay attention to good design:

  • Cooper Mini -dependable cars, great for city driving, easy to operate
  • Apple Computers - like all companies they make mistakes (they’ll never live down the single-click mouse, really) but more than make up for it with smart design
  • Bose audio - I’m not sure how I lived without one of their stereos before last Christmas; fantastic sound, small size, and simple remote control

All of these products are not the cheapest in their markets, nor are they the most expensive. They all have good design in common; good design comes from usability. Good design means more users will use the product. More use of the product translates into more money for the company.

All of the products (and a website is a product, an applicaiton is a product) are pretty easy to use, all of the products do what they are meant to do well, and all the products were built around users’ lives.