The Greatest Usability Test

It’s been a while since I wrote something on design. I have been gathering my thoughts recently and this is the result.

User interfaces are everywhere. From the newspaper you read in the morning, checking emails at office, dispensing coffee, visiting a hospital, even your alarm clock. Good user interfaces, well that’s something else!

Imagine for a moment that you’re an alien from Mars approaching Earth to conquer it. You walk out from your spaceship and find something on the ground that you can hold in your hands. Suddenly, it starts emitting a shrill noise, and with the fright you drop  it thinking it’s a weapon or worse, a bomb. It falls to the ground, but the shrill sound doesn’t stop. It does look pretty harmless though, so you pick it up. You examine it and you find something that is protuding out. You press it down and the alarm clock that you are holding in your hands goes silent. Obviously, since you haven’t been introduced to the context of a clock, you have no clue whatsoever what a “circular face with some writings” with two “hands” makes a clock. But you also need to be introduced to the context of the button on top of the clock that turns off the alarm. Without that knowledge you would have no idea of how to turn it off.

Same goes for all the other physical and virtual objects we interact with everyday. It is the endeavour of us designers to make our life difficult in order to make the object simple and easy to use for the user. Now what defines “simple and easy?”. The interface should be simple enough to be understood by your Mom and easy enough to not require a manual to use. This is the greatest usability test one can try. Before releasing a design or uploading a website, show it to your mom and ask her what she thinks of it. Can she use it within 5 minutes of your introducing her to it?  This is something I keep in mind whenever I design and it is my constant endeavour to simplify. That’s not always the easiest thing to do, and sometimes functionality comes in the way. And then you have to compromise one for the other.

Let me take an example. My mom had her first email account on Rediff. She was quite used to that interface and even when they updated it, she chose to stick on to the old interface. She knows her way around there – from where to find contacts, to where all the email folders are. I recently got her signed up on gmail. She started using it parallely with rediff. After a couple of weeks I happened to notice her using gmail. She was finding it quite difficult to grasp the concept of how the emails are displayed and why do they have a number in brackets next to the ones she had replied to etc. I then told her that it is not a single mail, but gmail shows them as conversations. It was only then that she understood the concept and then she had overcome her fear of using gmail and started using it regularly. I’m sure you have had a similar experience when you use a service for the first time. Unless you have seen a tutorial video or read up some instructions, it is very difficult to get started immediately.

The results of the test are quite intangible and feedback that you can get from it can be very vague at times. Visual/Textual cues are very important to ease navigation around an interface. Use large readable text wherever possible. Use graphical icons to indicate function if the text becomes too much. Avoid clutter and use colours to differentiate various aspects of the interface. Also, efficiency is the key – doing the absolute most possible with what you have.

The tips above are very basic and can be used by anyone who’s making an interface. Special attention to software developers who are often required to do UI work as part of their job. Don’t try to make your life easier by making things complex. Complicate your life to make your user’s life simple.