A Guide to User-Friendliness
Whitney Quesenbery, a renowned usability expert, has outlined five key criteria that contribute to a product's usability, ensuring it is effective and satisfying for users. These criteria are essential for creating products that not only perform well functionally but also provide a positive user experience.
1. Effectiveness: A usable product should enable users to complete their tasks accurately and successfully. This criterion emphasises the importance of a product's ability to help users achieve their goals with minimal mistakes.
2. Efficiency: Efficiency is about enabling users to complete tasks quickly and with minimal effort. A usable product should save users time and energy, making their interaction with the product as smooth and effortless as possible.
3. Engaging: A usable product should provide a satisfying and enjoyable user experience, encouraging continued use. This criterion highlights the importance of creating a product that users find pleasurable and gratifying to use.
4. Error Tolerant: A usable product should be able to handle user errors without causing significant problems. This criterion underscores the importance of designing a product that can recover from mistakes and guide users back on track.
5. Easy to Learn: A usable product should be easy for new users to understand and begin using with little instruction. This criterion emphasises the importance of creating a product that is intuitive and straightforward, making it easy for users to learn and interact with the product.
These criteria, when combined, emphasise not just the functional performance of a product but also the overall user experience, including how easily users can learn, use, and feel satisfied with it.
User-centered design, an iterative process, continually seeks to improve following each evaluation cycle, focusing on how and why a user will adopt a product. Usability, as defined by ISO 9241-11, is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals, with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
Joel Spolsky, a software engineer and creator of project management software Trello, stated that usability is a matter of bringing a bit of human rights into the world of computer-human interaction. Poor usability can lead users to seek alternative solutions, potentially causing them to leave a website or app. In a 2015 joint research, it was found that 46% of users leave a website because they can't tell what the company does, 44% due to lack of contact information, and 37% due to poor design or navigation.
In conclusion, usability is more than just ease of use; it also deals with user satisfaction, engagement, and aesthetics. By focusing on Whitney Quesenbery's five criteria, product designers can create usable products that not only meet users' needs but also provide a satisfying and enjoyable user experience.
- These five criteria for usability, as defined by renowned expert Whitney Quesenbery, also emphasize the importance of creating products that adapt to interior-design and lifestyle aesthetics for improved user experience, making them not only functional but also visually pleasing.
- UI design, by focusing on the efficiency of user tasks and the engagement factor, plays a crucial role in ensuring a usable product within the realm of home-and-garden and lifestyle products, where user interactions are vital.
- Graphic design, when applied with user-centered principles, can greatly improve a product's ease of learning and accumulate positive user experiences, as described by expert Quesenbery's usability criteria.
- Technology, when combined with user-centered design, allows for products that are effective, efficient, and error-tolerant, as embodied in Quesenbery's criteria for ideal usability.
- Education-and-self-development resources can incorporate knowledge of data-and-cloud-computing, allowing designers to better understand and implement user-centered design, ultimately improving product usability in various domains, improving the overall user experience through user-centered design principles.
