The last time I checked we are not breathing in Stone Age. This is age when it is quite expected to deliver beyond expected. Customer expectations have soared through the roof. Only a spark of brilliance is not enough, those who bring everything each day week-in week-out will rise to the top. There is a Chinese proverb for it "What you got here is not going to take you there." These turbulent times have changed the way customers buy software or services and competition is fierce than ever. Software vendors are hunting for new ways to allure customers; be it dazzling application functionality or world class support. Apart from this there is one more factor which is playing decisive role in success of a software product; Usability of the software. Software's usability—the ease with which end users can be trained on and operate the product— is becoming a fundamental purchasing criterion and a direct way of cutting operational costs.
Moreover it is ludicrous to consider application functionality and usability as trade-offs anymore,
Good Functionality + Bad Usability != Bad functionality + Good usability
Good functionality always take precedence but usability is making its way into the board room discussions. We simply can't afford to pay for products that cost us a lot of overhead anymore," said Keith Butler, a technical fellow at Boeing's Phantom Works research and development arm. When thousands of end users are involved, design flaws can cost millions of dollars in lost time and productivity, he said. So even if you pack ocean boiling features in your application but it takes 12 engineers 3 months to log into your application, you are going right out of the window. Yes, there are exceptions, for instance take Facebook, results of a heuristic evaluation show that Facebook performs poorly with regards to traditional usability guidelines. So in theory, Facebook should not be the success it currently is due to its failure when tested using a traditional usability evaluation method but its immensely popular and gazillions user flock around it. But every software doesn't get evolved up to Facebook level. Usability is something that no longer can be compromised in favour of diverting focus to functionality. Thanks to NIST there is a standard for generating usability test reports called CIF Usability Test Reports.
The development of a standard for comparing product usability was spearheaded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Called the Common Industry Format (CIF) for Usability Test Reports, the standard outlines a format for reporting test conditions and results and gives user companies enough information about a test to replicate it. This format has evolved as an ANSI standard already
Boeing played a lead role in the development of CIF after its experience and internal studies showed that usability played a significant role in total cost of ownership. In one pilot of the CIF standard on a widely deployed productivity application, the Chicago-based company said improved product usability had a cost benefit of about $45 million. Butler said it's much better to have vendors refine an interface design "than to have thousands of end users doing it involuntarily on top of their jobs and then just feeling frustrated."
With CIF it possible for vendors and users to discuss usability as a science rather than marketing hype. Several benefits of introducing summative usability testing into the development process:
* It provides a concrete benchmark for user performance and satisfaction, thus reducing the risk that the new system is more difficult to use (and therefore less successful) than the existing system.
* It highlights usability problems with the existing system that need to be addressed in the design of the new system.
* It provides specific goals for usability and gives developers the opportunity to became familiar with typical user task scenarios.
* It provides the framework for the more detailed usability work required by ISO 13407.
Microsoft Corp., also a major CIF development participant, has incorporated the usability testing it conducted on its Windows XP, Windows ME and Windows 2000 operating systems into the CIF format, said Kent Sullivan, Microsoft's usability lead for the Windows client. CIF has been adopted by major giants like IBM, Kodak, Cisco to name a few.
Even if the numbers of end users are very less usability tests still make a lot of business sense. As those few users will have direct say in whether their company should go for the next version or consider some other vendor. Usability is all about how you offer functionality to be harnessed without much effort, training and certainly frustration. It takes much longer time for user to explore all the functionality of the application but usability starts making a dent from Day One. Spending more thought, effort and time will put you in an elite group of vendors who claim to deliver Customer Felicity.
Further Readings:
CIF: http://www.usabilitynet.org/prue/cif.htm
http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iusr/documents/cifv1.1b.htm
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=633292.633470
User Experience: http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/
Courtesy: www.dilbert.com
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