Have you ever seen such applications which do not look pretty but that are simple to solve your tasks? What makes people continue using them when there are a lot of other nice looking, up to visual trends applications on the market? That is rather their usability.

What is the usability

Usability is the ease of access or use an applications (web/mobile). There are 5 criteria of usability:

1. It should be easy to learn. New users should start to use the application easy with no additional instructions or documentation. The complicated interfaces are in the past and now users expect simple and minimalistic applications.
2. It should be efficient. How quickly the customer will understand how to perform the action he needs and complete the objectives.
3. It should be memorable. The customer already spent some energy on learning how to use the product. How easy the usage may continue after some break in time (several months, for example).
4. Errors. How the product prevents the customer from errors, how many are allowed and what is the errors nature.
5. Satisfaction. Are the customers satisfied with the website functionality and its representation?

If the usability criteria are not met, ie the product is difficult to use, then the customer would not continue using it, instead, he will search for other alternatives. If the product is not specific and has many competitors, the customer will choose the one that provides a better experience and will not try to understand how to use a bad product.

How to improve the website usability

To start improving usability, we need to understand what is wrong. Often we may conclude the points for improvement, but mostly that is subjective. We may not see what are the most critical pinpoints for the customers and concentrate on secondary problems. The feedback in popular social networks, or the feedback form on the website is a good channel to understand what problems do customers face. And is pretty cheap. Another way is to handle a usability testing. Usability testing is the most effective way to get feedback from real users and to plan further enhancements.

A typical usability testing consists of 4 phases:

1. Prepare a list of known problems or scenarios you would like the customers to follow. List those hypothesis that needs to be checked. For example a problem may be “the sales are falling” and a hypothesis would be “because customers have problems to provide a delivery address”.
2. Prepare a list of scenarios/tasks to complete. For example, register, or place an order, or create a subscription. Note the questions to be clarified during the testing and the behaviour expected from the customers.
3. Based on the list of problems/hypothesis figure out the target audience for the research. The audience may be located at the same location or remotely, depends on the testing type (ie a focus-group, interview, moderated or immoderate online testing).
4. Give the tasks to the customers and watch. The testing may include eye-tracking and other technologies which help to analyse the testing results later. Write down all the problems the customers experienced and how solve them. If the testing is moderated, clarify what the expectations were, what affected their behavior, what were the feelings.

Again, based on the usability testing type and its goals, the researcher may participate in the process and help the customer and clarify the related questions getting more insider information, or not interrupting the whole testing process.

In complicated cases and especially when additional behavioural information gathered with eye trackers, heat maps and other technologies is needed, better to invite a specialised agency. Additionally it will help to analyse all the information.

Usability and conversion

The usability can be measured through conversion, for example, how much of the website visitors performed the target action? In most cases is order purchase and average order value (it gets affected through multiple points - the navigation, search, content, etc). The usability cost is low if the customer does not spend extra energy when working with the product.

To improve the conversion, designers and engineers work on the following topics:

• Decrease clicks count needed to complete the customer objective and make them more obvious and simpler;
• Increase the page loading speed;
• Remove redundant elements and functionality, and make the design minimalistic and understandable;

The product usability must be considered on all stages of the product development. That is why the tests should be simple, quick and not expensive. Working accordingly to the agile methodology the vector of development is constantly corrected and the usability testing is the key process in that. Do not forget about this while working on the product.