Why usability is a path to failure.

[Dcrux]

Why usability is a path to failure is a topic I've mentioned in previous posts. Unfortunately, this article is more linkbait than informative. (The comments are better than the article)

Usability is a hygenic factor. You can hurt a site by making it hard to use, but get no "bonus points" in the user's mind. It's obvious, really. Physical store users expect to find the products the store has to sell. Physical store users expect to be able to get into and navigate the store.

You gain no advantage for making it hard for users to shop. ....That is, unless all your competitors are truly horrible at usability. Which is why usability is so big on the web.

Usability barely gets you to zero in the user's mind for another reason -- usability is only half the equation. Usability folk are concerned with demotivators, or frictions in task completion. Users must be motivated for usability to work. That's why usability must be complemented with desirability design.

Even Jacob Nielsen explains usability is not enough. User Empowerment and the Fun Factor says as much, urging readers to move beyond ease of use. Which is why usability without desirability can be a path to failure.

[alienpest]

Usability seems to be the key to getting the search engines to index your site. All the standard website optimization rules seem to indicate that. Sure, you need something to offer the people when they get there, something to keep them there, but if the site isn't usable, the search engines will not find it to their liking, and no one will find it to begin with. What's the use of putting a fancy saddle on a dead horse?

[Dcrux]

The point is you get no advantage for selling horses whose only selling point is they aren't dead.

Only on the web would baseline primitive accessibility be confused with usability. Making your site code parsable by 'bots is not usability, it's bare minimum coding competence -- if that.

And until SE 'bots start buying things, putting in some thought about humans is a critical requirement. No store is going to advertise they didn't make doors fifteen feet off the ground, but somehow making a site show up in a browser is a feat of genius. Most of what passes for usability -- getting your site up to the minimal standard for a 'bot to parse it -- is so basic as to not be worth mentioning. It's not even human accessibility -- it's computer parse - ability.

But it has one thing which is apparently attractive to the code-obsessed ...there is not a hint of human nature to be found. Make no mistake, code parsability is not human usability. That's not even on the level we're talking about with this article.

[Orion]

great topic Dcrux

The way I always understood it...

accessibility is creating a page/site that is accessible to everyone (most focus is on visual and auditory impairments)

usability is creating a site that is easy to use (large focus on content layout, work flow and navigation)

usability and accessibility are functions of development they are technical aspects dealing with coding and layout of the site.

design is another piece (80% the won't really work without the other 20% tech stuff to back it up call it architecture if you like). design is a function of marketing, picking the right colors, font styles, where to place whitespace, content etc. etc.

Granted there are parts of the use / access - ability equation that are facilitated via marketing also but you always have to remember that no one will buy half a pie from the store..

Just my 2cents..

[Andilinks]

Usability is marketing. If understood properly. This is said as someone who navigates ecommerce sites for a living.

Some important percentage of those visitors who never make it to the checkout screen were victims of poor usability. I wouldn't try to learn usability from Neilsen unless I were an academic, as a retailer I'd learn from the volume players: Victoria's Secret, Netflix, Dell, 1-800-Flowers, Drugstore.com, Amazon, etc.

Copy them, they know usability that pays.

[bj]

Without a good product that people want, whether that product be something purchasable, or a more esoteric product such as content or a service, then it doesn't matter how usable, accessible, or attractive the site may be. I think that's where desirability comes into play, if I'm understanding you, Dcrux.

But if a grocery store with the best baker in the country put all its loaves of bread on the floor with no wrapping I doubt they'd be selling much bread, especially if they decided that electricity was too costly and turned out the lights.

There are a lot of bits and pieces that come into play to create a whole. Ignoring any one of those pieces may cost you.

[Dinghus]

I think the post lacks useablility. LOL Had to read it 2 or 3 times to really get what you were trying to say.

The situation that eluded you tho is that there are some sites that are horrible to use but have great sales because they have a product that people want very much. On the other hand, there are sites that are easy to use that have no sales because nobody wants what they are selling.

So the bottom line really is that you must have a product people want or useablility is a moot point. However focus on useability does not necessarily lead to the failure of the site.

[alienpest]

I was not talking about coding, I was talking about how people can get around your site to find what they need. If you design the site for the human user, the the search engines seem to treat it better. That is never an end to itself. If they cant find it on your site, they won't buy it, but finding it is only the start. You do need the whole pie.

[ArticleMaster]

Originally Posted by bj

There are a lot of bits and pieces that come into play to create a whole. Ignoring any one of those pieces may cost you.

I'm in total agreement with you BJ. As a web designer and developer (and a one-woman shop!) I have to start with ALL pieces in mind so that the whole thing works.

Usability is just one part, and a web site is not likely to fail based on just one part of the pie. And although I got shot down for it in a previous post here, I believe it all begins with the target market and what their skill level and motivation to buy are.

[chrisJumbo]

Are we just talking Usability for the un-handicapped or Usability for all?

I will admit that for the most part the former has been our focus. Although I have tried to give meaningful names to images and properly use H1,H2,H3 for structure.

I recently discovered that the simple act of leaving a link underlined makes a huge difference. People didn't realize that our bolded and different colored text were links and never moved their mouse over them to see the underline appear. For design, I didn't like how the underlines interrupted the "flow", but then using Google's Analytics and the overlay, I noticed no one clicked the links.

So in our case I had to put aside my design preferances so people would know they could click around.

For most sites you need to have good structure, easy navigation, and a good product/service/information to be successful.

[nipplecharms1]

Am I the only one so far, or maybe it has been said and I did not understand, that you have to get the people in the door first.

Build it and they will not necessarily come. A Field of Dreams was just that, a dream. If you cannot get your site to rank and no one knows it’s there, who cares if the tree really makes a sound when it falls. Ok, I am mixing some metaphors here.

My point is first that you have to get them in the door, have something they want once they are in, and then a way to quickly add the item to their cart and make the purchase. I worked for a company that often had 3-4 landing pages before you ever got to see a price of an item to buy. That is why now they are a 1MM company down from a 4MM company. That and their infrastructure is broken.

If you make it easy for the customer to add an item to the cart, in the fewest amount of clicks possible, you will have a better chance of making the sale. Is that usability or accessibility or just old-fashioned Marketing 101?

Why again is the milk at the furthest point from the front door in a supermarket? Hummmm?

My plug nickel and a grape soda.

Michael

[Dcrux]

Why again is the milk at the furthest point from the front door in a supermarket? Hummmm?

Why indeed. There are a lot of good points made. Let's take a practical example and separate basic common sense (not putting unwrapped bread on the floor) and more advanced design topics.

The point of the article is usability is one of several elements. Take milk or canned soup. Now I have read that when you stack the canned soup in alphabetical order, you sell X amount. Stack the cans out-of-order and you get a 30% increase in sales.

Put the milk -- or the quick stop items in the back of the store -- and sales go up. This is called merchandising, and many of the principles of desirability are counter to what you would normally call usability. For more about this, read Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy."

We all know that grocery stores put the milk and bread in the back of the store to make us shop the entire store before getting to the stuff we really want and need.
-- Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping - Paco Underhill

Physical stores practice visual merchandising. The tool they use is called a planogram. Online stores could use such diagrams -- but don't.

Check out any well-known chain, such as 7-Eleven or Target, and you'll quickly realize the product-positioning pattern repeats itself in every store. If you were to place a price on such a planogram, it would be worth millions. The planogram is the most potent tool available to retailers who wish to increase their conversion rates.

But, hey, hang on! If brick-and-mortar retailing values planograms so much, then think about the Web. How might the online planogram look?

-- Webogram Power, Part 1

Turns out when you analyze site sales, patterns emerge. And you'll find product selection on a page also determines how much sales of each product you get.

Like most retailers, PETCO assumed that the best way to showcase the products on a category page was to use a shotgun approach: lots of thumbnails on the page to show the breadth of products. Wrong again.

That time, we learned that picking one or two products and showing a larger, more attractive photo converted visitors to buyers at a faster rate than the thumbnails.
-- Why Your Site Doesn't Need to be Pretty

Looks, matter but not the way graphic artists want it to. ...And not the way usability people expect. Yes, of course people have to find the site and the products -- nobody is saying you shouldn't do the fundamentals. However, being in business is about competitive advantages, not bare minimums.

A planogram is a blueprint given to store operators of what items go where in a store. The purpose is to help improve overall sales and make optimal use of consumer traffic patterns. By creating business rules that optimize margins and inventory turns on key pages of a Web site, like home pages, popular paid search landing pages, and checkout pages (this, in effect, is what a Webogram would do), online retailers could be capturing incremental gains that will help sustain the eCommerce industry's double-digit annual growth for years to come.

-- Forrester Reseach Retail FistLook

Again, selling horses that aren't dead isn't the path to success. They're supposed to be alive, that's not a point of argument. But it's also not getting anyone to do business with you. So don't start slapping yourself on the back just because you put in TITLE and ALT tags and your page is SERP friendly. I'm not disrespecting SE positioning, I'm also not making SEO the be-all and end-all many have.

What I am talking about are ecommerce patterns that are a level beyond simple usability. I'm talking about a simple CSS change that produces a 389% increase in response. Not a word of text changed, mind you -- pure design.

My criticism of the article which starts this thread is these guys tear into usability, but fail to propose the "path to success" which follows usability as a path to failure. Desirability design is that path to success.

[Andilinks]

As I mentioned earlier, I surf ecommerce sites for a living, I visit a dozen or more new sites every day and have been doing this for years. The first thing I do on every site (after "View Source") is check out customer service and "contact us." Retail usability is the sea that I swim in.

If I were designing sites I would buy the list of the "Top 500 retail sites" (Google that) and I would study them until I knew cold what made them tick. Then I'd approach clients with the knowledge that the winners use.

Usability for paying customers is the only usability that will put food on your table. After dinner you can afford to think about usability for everyone else.

[bj]

Put the milk -- or the quick stop items in the back of the store -- and sales go up. This is called merchandising, and many of the principles of desirability are counter to what you would normally call usability.

Gee, that's exactly the reason why, when I only have milk and maybe one or two other items to buy I don't go in a supermarket, but instead walk around the corner to the local bodega, where it's three steps from the front door, then four steps to the counter to pay for it. And that holds true even if I'm driving right by the supermarket. So it would seem to me that they overthought that a bit, and lost a fair amount of revenue from me because of their "marketing" choices.

[Dcrux]

When your bodega makes as much per square foot as Walmart, I'll be the first one at the seminar they hold. I'm all for studying what converts, that's the point.

Apple Stores Now More Profitable Than Tiffany's Per Square Foot

Huh ...no mention of how smart your bodega is on the chart. Must be a conspiracy against usability.

The planogram is what makes the big guys tick. If you want your findings to be listened to, you'll want to describe them in planogram form.

[carlos_p]

So much concepts flying around in this thread...

Being an old-school-hardcore-designer and design teacher for almost two decades now, I just can't sit still while reading this.
Here's my 10(!) cents (keep them: with the interests it may amount to a lot in the future):

1—Usability is a buzzword some computer engineers with no design education or background found out some time ago. When they found out the miserable experience they were providing their users with, lo and behold! They came up with "USABILITY".
This, in reality, stems from a small part of a Design discipline called "ERGONOMICS"; a discipline REAL DESIGNERS have been studying for ages.

2—By "REAL DESIGNERS" I mean people who have some formal education in the field and who work full time providing REAL solutions to their client's problems. I'm not talking about would-be designers, nor smart skater-boys tottin' fresh copies of Flash+Photoshop, nor frustrated artists who have to sell design services for a living 'cause they're still waiting for their debut exhibition on the shoddy art-gallery at the mall, nor cubicle-bred sweatshop proletarians on a moonlighting escapade... (the list goes on and on...)

3—USABILITY stems from a very specific kind of what is called "COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS". This is a discipline which deals with the cognitive processes involved in communication. The corner-stone to this discipline is what is known as the "THEORY OF COGNITIVE LOAD". You have to start there if you want to take this matter seriously.

4—Admittedly, usability is more than that, as it gained much from another discipline called HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, which was already around when Nielsen pulled that rabbit out of his hat.

5—I myself find Nielsen's partner, Don Norman, much more interesting. His work is required reading for anyone interested in any discipline of design (check below). My perception is that Nielsen has always been too radical, maybe trying to get too much attention. Still, I think anyone interested in these matters should read his work too.

6—Usability hinges on TASK ANALYSIS. How many sites have been designed taking the users' tasks as the starting point to the project? DISREGARDING TASK ANALYSIS IS A PATH TO FAILURE.

7—But wait! Do you call it "WEB DESIGN" or do you called it "USABILITY DESIGN"? Or do you call it "PAINT BY NUMBERS"? A web design project is a DESIGN project. A lot of people think the "Designer" is just that guy/gall you call on to provide a "pretty picture" (or whatever). The designer has to be the person who lays out the blueprint for the project, she has to see the "big picture". A designer is someone who must be fit to work with a multidisciplinary team, someone who has to conceive a solution to a problem.
Usability or ergonomics or any other discipline involved in the design process is just a part of the solution. Stating that "USABILITY IS A PATH TO FAILURE" is a misleading statement. What I find to be really true is that ANY SHORT-SIGHTED APPROACH TO A DESIGN PROBLEM IS A PATH TO FAILURE.

8—Furthermore, usability is being sold short here: usability must be regarded as the SATISFACTION LEVEL the WHOLE EXPERIENCE provides to the USER. In the light of this more "holistic" concept, a site which provides a good INTERFACE but in which the internal processing performs poorly is in fact a site with poor usability. For instance: what USE is it to you if you go to an online store, find the item you want, enter that bus-load of shipping and payment information and then the final checkout page churns out an error?

9—Physical stores and their design, their layout, etc., can't be compared (in the same terms) to web design. Sure, the most needed items are at the back and the kids cravings are positioned at kid-line-of-sigh-height, etc. But how much time does it take you to get to the back of the store? And how much time does it get you to get back in your car and drive to another physical store?
On the web there are trillions of competing stores only 1-second away from one another. That's where usability (in the sense you people are thinking about) comes into play.
Some important concepts have already been mentioned. You can't drown your visitors in chocolates and bubble gum when they are looking for milk. You can't force-feed them pages full of stuff they don't want: they will simply leave to another site in a click.
(And btw, clicking through hundreds of sites a day for a living is an experience which isn't in any way comparable to the experience of a real user)

10—Yes, Amazon is the king when it comes to online store design. But make no mistake: it is extremely difficult and expensive to do what these guys do. And they do it by the book.
And what the "book" tells us? It tells us much more than what has been written on this thread so far... but one extremely important factor to successful usability is USABILITY TESTING. It is simply impossible to come up with something like Amazon without it.

PS: To whom it may concern, Google the words in caps and also check these out:
—Jef Raskin, "The Humane Interface, New directions for designing interactive systems";
—Preece, Rogers and Sharp, "Interaction Design: Beyond human-computer interaction";
—Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano, "Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication oriented techniques";
—Donald A. Norman, "Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine";
—Donald A. Norman, "The Design of Everyday Things";
—Donald A. Norman, "Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things";

Cheers,

[carlos_p]

Originally Posted by bj

<snip...>And that holds true even if I'm driving right by the supermarket. So it