Mike Fitzmaurice, VP of North America and Chief Evangelist at WEBCON.
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Too many business applications fail not because they lack functionality but because they have poor usability. Even if you enforce usage of a bad application by decree, at best that will force users to use it poorly, slowly and with a lot of mistakes.
Usability is not a luxury. But what’s meant by usability, let alone how to maximize it, is not always straightforward.
Intuitiveness Is An illusion
Oftentimes, application designers think they can make an application easy to use by appealing to, for lack of a better word, intuition. They seek to make an application work “the way users expect” or to make a solution “as easy as possible.”
This imperative has at least three problems. First off, “what users expect” is a moving target. It varies by user, by department and by situation. And since application builders and users rarely think alike, it’s very hard to achieve genuine rapport.
Secondly, being “easy” is a problem when the work being performed is inherently complex. Dumbing it down might make an application unusable; it might make too many assumptions and have to be set aside at the slightest anomaly. Users might feel forced to misuse an application in unforeseen ways that might be regarded as data entry errors (or worse).
Finally, intuitiveness is difficult to quantify, so it’s also really hard to test, let alone improve.
Do This Instead …
Focusing on what we can quantify would be a very good start, so how about we aim for accomplishing work 1) in the shortest amount of time, 2) with the least amount of instruction and 3) while making the fewest errors? Not only would that achieve business goals, but it would also be least likely to annoy day-to-day users.
What kinds of things influence those three metrics?
Being Purpose-Driven
A great many applications operate from the principle of allowing users to open a form representing something (a customer, an invoice, etc.), decide what to do with it and then figure out which steps must be performed to do that. It’s, for lack of an immediately better term, data-driven.
What if a user interface could instead be purpose-driven? In other words, oriented around the task to be performed, not the assets required to do so. It’s how software installation wizards and online store checkout pages tend to work.
Purpose-driven interfaces tell the user what’s going on, communicate context and explain next steps. They move immediately relevant information to the forefront and temporarily hide everything else. They provide feedback. They log telemetry. They make a lot of sense.
Things like solid documentation, online help, tooltips and more are also good, which should be obvious. The trouble is that, too often, application builders don’t take time to provide them.
Consistency
If you have five different applications written by five different people using five different tools, you’ll likely have five different user experiences. Users will have to be trained five times. And throughout the day, they’ll have to do mental context-switching as they move between applications. From time to time, they’ll accidentally mix things up and make mistakes.
This might not be so bad even at five applications, but what about 10? Twenty? More?
If you can provide consistent standards and conventions, and if all applications follow them (short of a good reason not to), you only need to train users once. If application No. 2 behaves like application No. 1, and it’s a purpose-driven application, they’re not going to need more training (and your training/support budget needn’t grow so much).
Reducing Steps
I once fell in love with a new expense reporting system because it automatically handled currency conversions. I traveled a lot, so it mattered.
The previous system had us do a lot of extra work to make things easier for the accounting department. IT defended this with arguments such as some employees’ time being more expensive than others, optimizing total throughput of the system, relatively few people traveled abroad, etc.
But then someone realized that neither accounts payable nor employees needed to do this at all. There were online web services for currency conversion, so entering the date, amount and local currency was enough. While they were at it, they also introduced the ability to photograph receipts and automatically OCR them (they were wrong sometimes, but checking/fixing them was still easier than raw data entry). It was life-changing.
Reducing steps isn’t about eliminating people—just maximizing their effectiveness. Not only can they do more in less time when they’re assisted by automation, but they can also spend less time on tedious tasks and put more effort toward higher-order work.
This streamlining can be facilitated by liberal use of business rules to perform calculations, determine if a case must be escalated, search for subject matter experts, identify the correct approver and more. By addressing this upfront, it won’t require small bursts of attention and thus even more work on an ongoing basis.
Reduced Risk Of Error
In the old expense system mentioned above, unless I was careful to check historical exchange rates for each transaction date, I’d wind up overcharging or undercharging my employer. Mistakes inevitably happened. But automation changed that.
Even when automation isn’t possible, you can still make plain the consequences of user choices (next steps, for example), providing the opportunity for needed adjustments before it’s too late. Online store checkout pages are good at this.
The Key: Don’t Get In The Way
With rare exceptions, users aren’t going to get excited about business applications. They won’t applaud your new purchase request forms. They have other priorities.
But you can, most definitely, make sure that using your new forms results in few (if any) complaints, that they’re filled in quickly without error and no time was spent figuring out how to do so. And when more work gets done faster and more correctly, and without needing to ask more of your staff, that’s usability for the win.
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