How Usable is Your Design?
Can you answer that question? Many companies can’t. How about these questions:
- Is your product usability improving over time?
- Are your products more usable than the competition?
- How do you know when a product is usable enough?
There is only one way to answer these questions. With numbers. You must measure usability. Guesswork and seat of the pants methods are not going to get you there. Metrics are the language of business.
Blueprint can help you measure the usability of your products, software and websites.
Why measure usability?
Poor usability has consequences for business results and for customer loyalty. Usability measurements can help you both define and hit the user experience target.
It can also help you:
- Establish product release criteria
- Track usability improvements
- Compare your product to its competitors
- Identify improvements between product versions
- Know when to exit the design cycle
How we measure usability
First, we make the definition of what it is we are measuring crystal clear - after all, if you can’t define something you can’t measure it.
Then we work with you to operationalize the usability definition in terms of your specific products. It is important that your measurements are valid and that the techniques used are grounded in industry standards.
In line with ISO standards 9241 and 20282, we make objective measurements of the effectiveness and efficiency of your product or system, and we measure user satisfaction. Depending on your product we may also measure other correlates of the user experience.
If you know a thing only qualitatively, you know it no more than vaguely. If you know it quantitatively - grasping some numerical measure that distinguishes it from an infinite number of other possibilities - you are beginning to know it deeply. You comprehend some of its beauty and you gain access to its power and the understanding it provides.
Carl Sagan
Astronomer
Impacting product design
You can harness the diagnostic power of usability metrics to target specific problem areas in your design.
Impacting your business
Usability metrics can be a leading success indicator - a predictor of your business performance. Once you have a corpus of data you can explore correlations with existing lagging indicators such as sales figures, return rates, customer loyalty measures, and call-center volume.
Getting stakeholder buy-in
If no one believes in your measurements they are of no practical value. So you need management backing. We have experience of helping companies see the value of usability metrics and we can help you champion this approach in your organization.
Want to learn more about user metrics?
Tell us about your needs for reliable user-focused metrics. Call Philip Hodgson on 312.238.9490, send him an e-mail, or request a proposal:
