Usability: ‘Lovely software. But I can’t work it’

By Jessica Twentyman


Ask anyone who uses a work computer as part of their day-to-day job and most will admit to ongoing struggles.

Many gripes will focus on the usability of the software: how difficult it is to navigate and how their passage involves numerous detours and frustrating dead-ends, necessitating anguished calls to help desks. In short, the software tends not to behave as they expected.

The impact on productivity of such confusion can be huge. In a recent survey by Global Graphics, an electronic document software company, 77 per cent of office workers estimate they lose up to one hour a week because business software is difficult to use.

Software vendors, on the other hand, prefer to focus on the time and money they dedicate to making their software as “intuitive” as possible, on their rigorous processes for pre-release usability testing and their dedication to gathering user feedback.

Frank Spillers, co-founder of Experience Dynamics, a usability consultancy based in Portland, Oregon, is on the side of the users. His company specialises in helping businesses – including big names in the technology sector – to understand better the problems that end users might encounter with their products.

“It’s as if designers and developers of software have become better at making software look simple on the surface, but as the user actually starts using it, they soon get helplessly lost. Navigation is often multi-layered and vital buttons are hidden away,” he says.

“My feeling is that software developers tend to build applications according to their own perceptions of users’ needs, not users’ actual needs. They find it hard to stop themselves from adding new features and functions, because they believe these make the product more applicable to a wider audience, when all they do is make it unnecessarily complex for the majority of users.”

Despite the lip-service paid by software vendors to usability, problems persist with even the most recent of products, says Chris Rourke, director of User Vision, an Edinburgh-based usability consultancy. His company offers an eye tracking service, based on technology that measures and records the path that users’ eyes take when scanning a user interface. “This allows customers to see which areas of the interface grab users’ attention and which areas they tend to overlook. If you’ve got a vital button or menu located in one of these neglected areas, your application or website isn’t likely to hit usability targets.”

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