Kushner & Associates Usability Testing and Design Consulting

About Usability

Usability is the combination of fitness for purpose, ease of use, and ease of learning that makes a product effective. The importance of usability to your company depends on the maturity level of your products market (see credit):

Stage 1 - Leading edge concept

Products that use new-concept technology, cellular phones, digital cameras, Internet browsers, can sometimes be characterized as solutions looking for problems. Often user tasks often dont map to familiar activities. Early-adaptors are technology professionals or technophiles.

Usability in stage 1 means getting the product to work. You can price however you want, your users need lots of training and support. Your companys goal is to grab market share. The stage ends with competition, which you cannot predict or prevent.

Prepare the product for an easier transition to Stage 2 by using the best development tools available, simple and consistent user terminology, good metaphors, and a thorough analysis of users and tasks in context.

Stage 2 - Feature wars

Usability in stage 2 means having the right functions. Prices start dropping. Rapid bug fixes are crucial. MS surpassed Apple in the mid-1980s by defining its key market as developers, not end-users, and by giving those developers more software (features), which they needed, so they could produce more end-user applications faster, giving end-users a wider feature-choice. Stage 2 ends when there are no meaningful functions left to add, and users start looking for ease of use, ease of installation, ease of learning. This is why MS has now tried to adapt the Apples interface. Most computer genres are in this stage now.

Prepare the developers for Stage 3 by using automated testing tools, hiring designers and usability specialists, and training star technical communicators and developers to become design integrators, and by adding empowered users to your design team.

Stage 3 - Productivity wars

Haapsalu Hoteles motel baratosUsability in stage 3 means the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. ISO 9241-11, Guidance on usability, 1997

Users are more sophisticated and demanding; they want good online support, built-in learnability ease of migration, wizards, performance support features, for example, suites like MS Office, Lotus SmartSuite. Usability testing is essential for ongoing development efforts.

Prepare your company for Stage 4 by adding internationalization and localization capabilities to all products and also to your organization, and by doing more context analysis to determine what significant changes have occurred in the user workplace since Stage 1.

cheap hotel in NaxosStage 4 - Transparency

Usability in stage 4 means the product is invisible. Products in the genre have become a commodity; and price is the key differentiator. Companies must lower production costs and find new markets, for example, branding, e.g. Intel Inside, and OEM distribution.

When your products genre reaches this stage, you can do further usability work through Industry, Government, and International Standards organizations, and through liaison with consumer groups.

Credit: Thanks to Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering (http:\\www.uie.com) for the maturity stages

Our headquarters are in Israel, but our goal is global:
To make technology more usable by humans!

For more information, please email dkushner@utesting.com,
phone +972 3 560 2635,  fax +972 3 560 2971,
 or write to 14 Engel Street, 65224 Tel Aviv, Israel