My Phone Bill

One thing I really like about usability is that the basic concept is so easy to explain to people. So why is it so hard to actually create usable products/websites/services.

I got my AT&T bill yesterday. There was a new line item that I had never seen before: Zero Plus Dialing (it cost my $34.56). I decided to go to the website to find out what it was. (You’d think I would know better, but I am ever hopeful, and besides the automated phone systems aren’t much better).

So I go to the business tab on the website (though I have both personal and business lines on the same account). There is nothing on the page to indicate where I would go with questions about my bill. There are three ways for me to manage my account: Account Manager, Premier and Business Direct. I don’t know what these distinctions mean and there is no definitions, so I give up, I mean I go to Search.

In the Search box I type: Zero Plus Dialing. the search results highlights the words Plus and Dialing and indicates links in various categories such as Residential, Business, Billing and Account, Help and Customer Support and Corporate Information. None of this information looks remotely useful to me and there is no exact match to my query.

So I type ‘Zero Plus Dialing’ (with the single quote marks). Thinking that will limit my results and yield the exact match. It’s on my bill it must be on the site explaining the service somewhere. Needless to say, the message I got was: We’re sorry, there are no pages on this site containing the word(s) you entered.

What a strange message. There are pages containing the individual words, I know, I saw them. But there is no match to that particular string of words. This may sound picky, but this level of detail and specificity is very important in creating an aura of trust.

At this point the only way to keep going online is to register under one of the manage account choices. I just don’t want to do that today, I’m already frustrated, so I’ll call customer service. This should be fun!

. . .

Well I did get to a live person and got an answer to my question. It was a collect call from my daughter. She was returning from Europe and called me collect from the airport in Georgia. Now if the label on the bill had said Collect Calls instead of Zero Plus Dialing, I would have known right away and not wasted all that time.

I’m still angry about the cost of the call, but at least I have an explanation and now a blog post about a usability issue.  My job is so great!

 

Design vs. Usability

Design vs. Usability: Collaboration not competition

When I contact people at small companies about their website and their obvious need for usability, I frequently hear about the great design team they hired. Then I proceed to ask if they have done or plan to do any usability evaluations on their site, and there is silence. Owners of websites don’t seem to understand the difference between design and usability and why they are both critical functions to getting a really effective website.

I also get calls from recruiters and see lots of advertisements looking for a person who can design, code and then evaluate a website. They expect to find one person who can do it all, perfectly. It’s like being both the writer and editor. It’s like being both a programmer and quality assurance tester. It’s like the fox guarding the henhouse. It just doesn’t work.

Depending on the size of your company and the features on your website, the ‘designers’ may be someone at your company or a friend who knows html and some programming or the webhosting services software and template design or a dedicated website design firm or consultant. Anyone who has a hand in the creation of the interaction is designing the site.

In addition to design if people will interact with your site in a way that is more complicated that browsing for information, finding out about your services and giving you a call, then performing some level of usability evaluation will be useful.

The most comprehensive analogy I have for the complementary nature of Design and Usability is that of Developer/Programmer and Quality Assurance Tester. Just as the writer of the code does not also perform the testing, the person or people who design a website cannot be the same people who evaluate the site to see if it works. It’s just too difficult if not impossible to evaluate your own work. You can’t see the mistakes in spelling or logic, and after a while the only way that makes sense is the way you have designed (coded) it. QA and Usability act as an objective observer to point out issues and recommend solutions which help make the end result so much cleaner.

This is not a competition. It doesn’t have to be a choice between a great design that is creative, exciting and fun but difficult to use on one hand; and one that is boring, bland and dull but gets the job done on the other. A really great team knows that Design and Usability are complementary not antagonistic. Professionals in each field can work together in a respectful way to create something better than either could possibly do on their own.

To further the analogy of coders and Q&A, the development team is not angry at QA when they find problems. They expect there to be problems and hope that they are found. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if the designers said, “You are right we probably don’t have the perfect site yet. Let’s find out what’s important to the users and if the site works for them. Let’s do whatever it takes to make the site easy for our clients to use.”

Suzanne Singman

www.usabilityinsights.com

(510) 531-1294

What is Usability?

In the dictionary ‘usable’ means: that which can be used, or convenient to use. Usability is the ability to use something.

Wikipedia uses more flowery terms: Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object’s perceived efficiency or elegance.

So you can see that usability is a measure of how usable a thing is, whether that thing is a website, a microwave oven, a cell phone or an automobile. Can a person use it or do they need an instruction manual (which they won’t read anyway, or at least not until they are stuck)? Can they pick up the thing and make some sense of it right away and perform the basic functionality? On my microwave I can just type in the time I want it to cook and press start. On my mom’s microwave I have to press a button to tell it that I am going to cook something and then type the time and then press start. Of course I am going to cook something, it’s a microwave, that is the basic purpose of the machine and it should be the easiest thing to do.

 

Needless to say I am passionate about usability, about making things easy, about the machine/computer/software/website doing the work so the people don’t have to.

 

So what does usability mean for a website?

Usability means that people can come to a site and do the things they need to do easily and with little or no effort. People refer to these websites as “intuitive” (my feelings about that word will be saved for another post). The site makes sense and flows. The path to the desired information is easy and clearly marked.

 

We’ve all been to un-usable sites. That’s when you are tearing your hair out and yelling at the computer because the links take you somewhere you don’t want to go. Just yesterday I was ordering a book online and the site forced me to go through a registration process before I could buy the book. I don’t want to be their friend, I don’t care if they remember me or not, it is unlikely now that I will return to the site because I just wanted to get a book and they wanted my life story. Now, I was able to actually order the book, and they did get my money, but my experience wasn’t very ‘user-friendly’ and I wouldn’t recommend the site to others.

 

If you are doing business on the internet your site better be usable to your customers. There are so many choices and so many other websites that if someone can’t use your site the competition is just a click away.

 

Suzanne Singman

www.usabilityinsights.com