Tuesday, January 22, 2019

A wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail. (Jakob Nielsen)

In other words, there is a big difference between usability and utility. 

Say you test a new system, and it performs well. It’s then released … and sinks like a stone. What just happened?

Sounds like something that worked just fine, but didn’t actually solve any user needs. In other words, it’s usable, but useless at the same time.

So, should usability engineers be testing for both conditions? Isn’t our job merely a matter of the former, and not the latter?

Well, if you really want to add some value to what you do, though you can concentrate on usability, you need to keep your antennae out for utility as well. An obvious way to go about that is to ask upfront. 

The SUS questionnaire, with its first statement being “I think that I would like to use this system frequently,” is perfect for that. Just be sure to follow up. Another thing you can do is to just ask straight out in the debrief. A question like, “Is this something you would use?” should work just fine. 

One more thing to consider is to include self-directed tasks. In other words, instead of a super-specific task that asks the user to, say, find what date check 1338 cleared, you could start out by asking them if they use checks. If they say no, you now have some information about the utility of that particular feature. You can also, of course, still ask them to complete the task (“for the sake of this exercise,” I usually say). An additional benefit of this approach is that it keeps users task-oriented, but also gets them to start thinking about the value of what you’re asking them to do. 

Now, is there a way can you stop such problems from happening in the first place? Well, it’s really not part of a usability test, but if you can get involved upfront – doing ethnography, in-depth interviews, focus groups – these are obvious places to address the utility question and to get at users’ true unmet needs.

Heck, why go to all the time, expense, and trouble of solving a problem that doesn’t even exist? Surely, there are more than enough problems out there that do.


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