Usability in One Easy Step (First Draft)
Posted on April 5th, 2006 in Usability | 3 Comments »
Joel Spolsky writes: “Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”
This is an interesting but also a terrible characterization of usability. It is interesting because it is simple. It captures the gist of usability. At the same time, it is terrible because it assumes that it is possible for something to behave as expected for all users. The crux of my disagreement is that what I expect in terms of behavior is different than what you expect. But, is usability tied to you, me, or both? If a software product is meant for thousands of users, exactly who is expecting exactly what?
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And similarly, my pet hate and a word I’m trying to ban (as getting people to use it properly seems an even greater challenge): intuitive. What is intuitive? Probably something that behaves exactly as expected!
From a business perspective, managing your customer’s expectaions is very important. In this case business people mean the folks paying the bills. In my experience this has to do with custom or mostly custom software projects. This is very important to the finances of a project. If a customer has incorect expectations, they will come back to you and demand changes at your expense to make the application meet their expectations.
Translating this from a business to client relationship to a software designer to software user relationship, this means two things to me:
1) make sure you make enough effort ahead of time to find out what sort of expectations your users will have before they ever see your product. What pre-concieved notions do they have? Maybe this is market research? Maybe this is just looking at your competators, like your users probably have. Maybe looking at non-software analogs.
2) spend some time setting your users expectations. If your application is going to do some unuusual things, provide unexpected (innovative) features spend some time making it easy to introduce your users to those features before they use them wrong. Video tutorials aren’t hard to produce with tools that do screen captures and record audio and save it as a flash swf file. Or just write a good manual…
So, this article of Joel’s… it’s about Operating Systems… the whole thing. He knows his “expected” line is pretty much tongue in cheek. I “expect” he’s going to clarify things in the near future…
Designers on Joel
Apparently we weren’t the only ones to notice Joel Spolsky’s rather empty observation on usability. John S. Rhodes over at WebWord also takes issue. He puts it very succinctly:If a software product is meant for thousands of users, exactly who