Usability Redefined: Howability, Taskability, Recommendability, Profitability
OLD Ease of Learning: How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
NEW Ease of Doing: How fast can a user accomplish the desired task? How much time? How much energy applied per unit of measured time?
Why better? Takes into consideration users doing something versus knowing how to get it done; practical and concrete measures; accounts for situations where learning is not needed nor desired. Deliberately factors out the need for learning, education, or necessary assistance.
OLD Efficiency of Use: Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
NEW Pain Tolerance: What is the level of pain users are willing to endure to learn a task? How much are they willing to suffer before abandoning the task?
Why better? Takes into account the very real fact that many users are not willing to complete a task if it is too painful or difficult. Especially useful for examining and digging into why tasks and transactions are completed. Why measure speed and efficiency if users never even get the opportunity to become experienced? Further, this breaks the assumption that users must be experienced at all to accomplish a task.
OLD Memorability: If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything?
NEW Recommendability: What is the likelihood that a user will recommend the system to others? If users are willing to recommend, they are willing to use again. Further, if a user recommends the system to another user, it is obviously memorable.
Why better? Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing a system can entertain. It is obviously business oriented and somewhat task focused, but more importantly, it truly focuses on user to user connections which is something lost with memorability, and usability in general. Focuses on networks and social connections of people. Also, while memorability is good for focusing on decreasing costs associated with re-learning it is bad for understanding translation to growth. Recommendability is more positive and focuses on the value of improvements, working with others, and human to human interaction. Bottom line, cost reduction is limited in value whereas growth is not.
OLD Error Frequency and Severity: How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
NEW Subjective Severity of Errors: To what extent are users willing to suffer the errors of a system? How intense do users perceive the errors? To what level do errors impact user satisfaction, but more importantly, task completion and recommendability?
Why better? Errors are only errors if users subjectively experience pain. Some users are very forgiving and their task completion may not be impacted at any level. Of critical note, Error tolerance and subjective severity is directly tied to recommendability, which in turn is particularly useful for business and monitoring system profitability.
OLD Subjective Satisfaction: How much does the user like using the system?
NEW Dance to Profit: Is the system good enough to drive down costs and increase profits when considering how users operate as part of the system? What is the financial impact of users on a system? What is the financial impact of systems on users?
Why better? When recommendability is high, error tolerance is high, and subjective severity is low, a poor design system can actually be quite profitable. The Dance to Profit is the measure to ensure that businesses are considering their systems while watching user tasks and the bottom line. For those not as concerned with profitability, simply replace profitability with the most importance measure of success for your system, organization, etc. Look for the measure that keeps the end goal as the end goal, in the context of good user experience.
Comments?
December 22nd, 2005 at 1:52 pm
Aside from cost-efficiency, how does this new definition differ from user experience design? To me, usability has always been one of the many “sub-disciplines” of UED…
December 22nd, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Good question!
I think perhaps it is different in two key ways. First, as you point out, New Usability, Neo Usability, Usability 2.0, or Whatever You Call It, is tied to cost, money, profits, value, and as you state, cost-effeciency. Peter Morville hits on this with “Value” when he describes User Experience Design. The bottom line is the bottom line, which is neglected with usability.
But, I think there there another dimension that is missing, namely Human-to-Human Connections. More broadly, it might just be a matter of looking at usability beyond one user. People talk to each other. Organizations are connected. Groups work collaboratively. Usability typically fails to capture this. Usability is about connections, particularly human connections.
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Interesting. I never really saw collaboration as an aspect of usability. In retrospect, it could be implicit depending on the type of collaboration. At a glance, I figure there are three types of collaboration.
There’s one where users contribute to the integrity of the data (think Wikipedia or social bookmarkting).
2nd and 3rd are conversations (think blogging à la Cluetrain), one where users converse for the development of your product or service, and the other where users converse for the sake of conversation.
I would think the first two easily falls into usability. The latter one would fall under the “Desirable” part of Morville’s definition of User Experience Design.
What do you think?
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:51 pm
I think collaboration is a reasonable word to capture what I’m talking about. However, it doesn’t cover it in total. Collaboration seems to imply that two people are directly working with each other, but I think collaboration can happen indirectly: human-computer-human or asynchronous delivery. It appears to me that collaboration and networkability capture the idea. The ties are in the humans, systems, and networks.
Regarding collaboration and networkability, social bookmarking is an interesting topic. How good is the system at making it easy for humans to connect to each other?
A rather slick example is the following. Tagging is mostly selfish and egotistical, yet the cumulation of tags benefits all. Overall system usability improves as users tag, which means that users benefit from the collaboration and connections. Unintentional usability or emergent usability. Sweet!
Maybe that is what all of this is about. Greater usability emerges as users focus more on their own wants and needs, as long as collaboration and networking are natural parts of the system. Stated differently, you don’t always need to predefine or predict or bake usability into a system as long as users are able to connect to each other as they think and act.
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:56 pm
Very interesting article John. I think you’re on track to something here. I think I better read your post 2-3 times more
December 22nd, 2005 at 5:19 pm
Yeah, tagging is certainly an excellent example of how collabonetworkability becomes implicit in usability. All this talk of collabonetworkability reminds me of The Long Tail’s recent article on The Probabilistic Age.
December 22nd, 2005 at 6:09 pm
Nice link on The Probabilistic Age. Just read that earlier today.
Revisiting: How good is the system at making it easy for humans to connect to each other?
I need to noodle more on this. I don’t think I have it quite right.
Here’s the next stab: How well does the system help forge both implicit and explicit connections among users? How much does the system convert discreet connections between users to fluid connections? Collabonetworkability would be the measurement of communication flow between users.
Let’s break this down yet another way. How is the usability of networked life measured? We all need to admit that usability is still very much tied to ergonomics, meatspace, and standalone applications. Usability doesn’t effectively address human collaboration in an increasingly networked world.
And, as I’ve stated many times in the past, it doesn’t effectively reflect business and need for profits.
December 22nd, 2005 at 6:48 pm
Hmmm… the way I see it, collaboration may simply be an end (desired result) and usability is… well, the usability of the means to get to that end. At this point, I’m not sure how usability in itself is supposed to address collaboration. Could it simply be beyond usability’s scope and definition?
January 27th, 2006 at 9:16 am
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April 4th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Web Service Provider.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
This articles picks out some interesting parts of user experience, e.g. pain tolerance. I don’t think the ‘new’ replaces the ‘old’ for the most part. I would phrase it as enriching the picture, rather than revamping the old one.
Also, more rounded thinking would include asking “Why worse?” rather than just “Why better?”.
Thanks
A,
July 11th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Hi again
Just to be more specific… the ‘ease of doing’ could not entirely replace ‘ease of learning’ because it doesnt take account of a) the internal sense the user has that they know how to do thing, and b) people could get a task done, but having misunderstood how they did it. So the ‘ease of doing’ measure does not (to my mind) transcend the ease of learning. But, of course, it is very useful and complementary.
Efficiency of use and pain tolerance also seem to be complementary, rather than the latter replacing the former.
Memorability and recommendability: this is interesting. As I understand it, memorability is a totally different type of measure than recomendability. Just because someone says or does actually recommend the site, that says nothing about how easily the person could use the system again in the future - which is an important measure.
July 30th, 2007 at 2:26 am
I’ve yet to find any real list of ‘JavaScript Heuristics’ related to the use of JavaScript in a site. However, there are methods of implementing JavaScript in ways that improve both the overall user experience as well as general site accessibility, and so I think developing a couple of rules specific to that would be useful. A set of JavaScript heuristics I created for a recent usability review included. Does the site navigation work with JavaScript disabled? Does key site functionality fail when JavaScript is disabled? Does the site use (script based) pop-ups? Does the site use device independent scripts? No doubt there are others that could be included here, but I think it’s a good start… Can you add to this?