What Is Usability? Designing for Ease

Usability measures how easy a product is to use. In design circles, usability focuses on making products—whether websites, furniture, or hotel lobbies—as simple and hassle-free as possible.

For example, imagine you’re a UX designer or UX researcher building a website for a kitchenware company. Can users easily find and browse product offerings despite never visiting the site? Can they easily adjust items in their cart if they add something accidentally? Do customers come away from the website feeling satisfied or confused and frustrated? These are some questions you’ll address by thinking about usability.

Read on to gain a deeper insight into usability, its components, and various testing mechanisms. 

Components of usability

Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of leading user experience (UX) design firm Nielsen Norman Group and pioneer of usability, outlines five components that define good usability:

• Learnability: A user should be able to learn to carry out simple tasks the first time they use a product. 

• Efficiency: Users should be able to complete tasks quickly once they’ve grasped the product's basic design.

• Memorability: Even if users haven’t used a product for some time, they should be able to come back and remember how to use it.

• Errors: A user should make a few severe errors, and a product should allow users to recover from them.

• Satisfaction: Using a product should be a pleasant experience.

Usability vs utility vs user experience: What’s the difference?

If usability is the ease of using something, utility is its actual usefulness. Utility asks of a product: Can you accomplish the task you set out to do in the first place? Even if an app to make haircutting appointments is easy to use and delightful to navigate (hallmarks of good usability), it stands ineffective if you can’t actually make appointments. 

Usability and utility are, in turn, both distinct parts of the user experience (or UX). UX encompasses the entire process of a user interacting with a product. Depending on the definition, UX can also include desirability, brand experience, credibility, accessibility, and findability.

Why does usability matter?

Good usability means users can accomplish their tasks quickly, with minimal stress and errors, and ultimately feel satisfied when interacting with a product. For companies creating products, this becomes important for attracting customers. Users are more likely to gravitate toward products with better usability, and more likely to recommend those products to other people.

For websites, in particular, usability is crucial. Visitors to a website can easily leave when they encounter difficulty or confusion. When you buy a physical product, you must return it to the shop or post office. With a website, navigating away from a less-than-ideal product is much easier.

Usability testing

Designers, user researchers, and usability specialists often run products through usability testing, which can help determine what expectations, preferences, and troubles a user has. Once they have a clearer idea of what's going well—and what isn't—they can refine a design.

Usability testing methods

It's important to conduct usability tests throughout the design process so you can identify any potential issues as early as possible. Usability testing takes several forms. These include:

• Card sorting: Write out concepts (like features) on notecards, and ask participants to organise them into groups that make sense, then create labels for those groups. Card sorting is useful in organising a website or mobile app; you may use it in the mockup or wireframing stage.

• Guerilla testing: A team brings a design or prototype into a public space, such as a cafe or park, and asks passersby for their input. This can be a quick, low-cost way to gather feedback.

• Session recordings: Often used with digital products like websites or apps, session recordings involve a researcher watching a recorded session of a user navigating the product to accomplish a task. This can also include a heatmap analysis—a visual representation of where most users are clicking, scrolling to, or pointing their mouse.

• Lab usability testing: Moderators invite participants into a controlled environment where they can observe their behaviour or ask questions as they interact with a product. Since lab tests require significant coordination, moderators usually limit participant numbers to small groups, whereas lab testing is good for in-depth, qualitative research.

• Remote usability testing: Participants complete a series of tasks at home. You can choose monitored or unmonitored remote usability testing. If it's monitored, a user researcher is likely "watching" the participant use the product in real time via a shared virtual space, whereas if it's unmonitored, the participant records their session for a researcher to review later.

Determining the best usability test for your product depends on your budget, scheduling, and time constraints. Remote testing tends to be less expensive than in-person testing. Still, in-person testing can reveal a wealth of helpful information thanks to a user's body language, facial expressions, and more.

How do you measure usability?

Usability tests will ideally reveal a lot about how your product can be improved. If you’re keeping an eye out for metrics on how to improve usability, consider the following metrics: 

• Success rate: Whether users can complete a task at all

• Time: How long it takes for users to complete a task

• Error rate: How many errors users made

• Satisfaction: How satisfied users were

Tip: Before designing a new product or redesigning an older one, it's important to conduct pre-design research. Spend time researching and defining 1) who your users are, 2) what the central design problem is, and 3) what the design requirements are.

Getting started: Learning usability

Implementing usability principles into a creation process has the potential to make a product easier, more intuitive, and more satisfactory to use. Typically led by researchers, on-site or online, usability testing seeks to uncover any confusion or challenges users face when using a product or a service. You can opt to learn usability and usability testing through several avenues. 

Not sure where to start? With the Google UX Design Professional Certificate, you’ll be exposed to UX research and testing basics and plan your own UX research study. You can also dig deeper into the usability test process through the University of Michigan’s User Experience Research and Design Specialisation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)