Usability Matters

Matt Lacey

• Publisher: Manning Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781617293931
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: UI/UX Design

Usability Matters: Mobile-first UX for developers and other accidental designers gives you practical advice and guidance on how to create attractive, elegant, and useful user interfaces for native and web-based mobile apps.

Chapter 1. Introduction

This chapter covers

• What usability is, and why it matters
• How user experience contributes to success
• The six components of great apps
• Why each component is important

As someone involved in the creation of mobile apps or games, you’ll want what you create to be as successful as possible. Regardless of how you define success, you can’t overlook the factor that the experience you create for the people using your app plays a role in achieving it. Throughout this chapter, I’ll introduce six components that contribute to great, successful app experiences, but I’ll start by defining what I mean by usability and the experience of using an app.

1.1. What’s usability, and why does it matter?

When it comes to creating apps, you’d probably rather spend most of your time focusing on code. Sadly, the successful developers I know say that the code only accounts for between 10% and 40% of their success. Many factors contribute to a successful app, but I believe that expanding your focus to also think about the experience of using an app is the easiest way to make simple, tangible improvements.

In this book, you’ll learn how to think about usability and the experience you’ll want your app to convey. Plus, you’ll gain lots of practical tips and general advice for changes you can make to improve them. Rather than tell you how to address specific scenarios, I’ll give you the knowledge to address all scenarios. These aren’t the things you’d normally see in a book about design—that’s because this book is specifically for developers like you.

Usability beyond mobile apps

You can apply the principles, knowledge, and lessons in this book to more than mobile apps. While this book focuses on mobile app examples, the principles behind the advice can be applied to websites and apps that run on any device.

In some ways, building for all the constraints of mobile can make other software development seem easier. If you can create an app that works on multiple devices, it’s much easier to build something that has to work only on one. Similarly, if you’re able to optimize for multiple forms of input or output, then non-mobile software that doesn’t need to account for as many situations can seem simple by comparison.

1.1.1. Usability matters to everyone

If you’re making the conscious decision to expand your app development knowledge beyond just code, or you’re looking for a way of making your app stand out among the competition and keep people using it, usability should matter; it matters to the people who use the app. Usability is about how easy your app is to use. People don’t want to spend their time trying to work out how to use your app or remembering how it’s different. An app that’s easy and intuitive will keep people using it repeatedly. They’ll also be more inclined to tell others about it in a positive way.

1.1.2. Usability, UX, and design

Design and designer are terms loaded with nuance and interpretation. They mean different things to different people and cover a broad array of concepts and topics. Everything from graphic design to branding, animation to copywriting, iconography to user interfaces, usability to human-computer-interaction, and user experience (UX) to information architecture, all fall under the umbrella of design. You don’t have to be an expert in each area of design, but knowledge and awareness of each will help. This book covers many aspects of design, but two that need special mention are usability and UX:

• Usability— An aspect of design that looks at how easy something is to use. The only way to measure usability is by testing it with real people who use apps. We’ll come back to testing many times throughout this book, because getting feedback from the people who will use and are using your apps is important. To learn how to run your own usability tests, I recommend reading Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug (New Riders, 2009).
• UX— A popular term that many people have appropriated in recent years. It’s a formal discipline with recognized practices and techniques. More than just focusing on software design, it encompasses all aspects of interaction with a product, service, or company.

This book isn’t trying to teach you to be a UX expert or to give you license to call yourself a designer. This book will enable you to take the apps you’re already developing and create better experiences for the people using them so you (and your app) can be successful.

1.1.3. The formula for app success

App success is based on three important factors: value, experience, and luck. You can be successful with one, but striving to address all three is best. The distinction between these factors can sometimes be blurry, but this book focuses on the second. It’s about the experience that you design for the people using the app.

Please don’t make the common mistake of thinking that usability and UX are only about how your app looks. The experiences created by using your app can be much richer and more nuanced when you consider more than just the visuals. If this weren’t the case, this would be a book about user interface design rather than usability and the user’s experience. In this section, I define the three success factors:

• Value— What a person gets from using an app. This could be a single benefit or many.
• Experience— Relates to how the value is provided. It’s about the feelings and emotions that a person has when using an app.
• Luck— The variable that you don’t have complete control over.

Let’s look at value first. Some ways that your app can provide value for the people using it are

• By making a task possible
• By making a task simpler
• By making a task faster
• By earning a person money
• By saving a person money
• By entertaining
• By informing
• By educating
• By serving as a distraction or way to pass the time (although this is rarely a good reason for creating something)

Your app’s ability to meet the needs and desires of the people using it is part of the value it provides. You need to make sure you’re building the right thing for the people looking for the value you provide, not just making something possible. Sometimes a mobile app isn’t the best way to meet a person’s needs or to provide the value they seek.

Note

Meeting user needs is the fundamental principle of providing value. If you can’t provide value, it doesn’t matter how good the experience is. People won’t use the app.

The experience you create for the user is dependent on the value you’re providing. There may be some overlap between the two when defining the context of use and the target market for the app. Experience is also, in part, about how you deliver value. The experience you create for the people using the app is what impacts success. Traditional UX tasks, such as user research and testing, can contribute to the experience you create, but they aren’t the same thing. In most cases, you’ll want the experiences you create to be positive, but this isn’t always the case.

When you might want to create a negative experience

You will want to consider two occasions when it might make sense to provide a negative experience. The first is to discourage bad or negative behavior. For example, if a player was to turn on their teammates in your game, you might want to do something to discourage them from doing this again. You could reduce the effectiveness of their armor, restrict the strength of their weapons, artificially limit the responsiveness of the game, or include another creative way of letting them know the consequences of doing things they shouldn’t. Or, your app can force a negative experience upon the person using it when they do something that’s detrimental to the other people who use the app. If someone’s repeatedly reported for spam or offensive content in your chat app, you may choose to limit the length or frequency of messages they can send.

The second reason for deliberately creating a negative or challenging experience is if you want to increase positive emotion in the future. (This is a common strategy used in games to keep people playing.) If someone must struggle and fail a few times to achieve something, such as completing a level or defeating an opponent, they’ll feel much better when they do achieve their goal. In this scenario, the positive feeling will be higher after they’ve failed a few times than it would’ve been if they had achieved their goal on the first attempt.

Creating a great experience in your app is important because you can’t rely on luck. For example, large companies that have had success in the past release new games to a muted response. Or, individual developers have seen their games suddenly become viral hits months after release. Luck is as good as any name for this factor, but it isn’t totally out of your control. Becoming a viral hit, being repeatedly featured in the app store, or having positive reviews in the press isn’t something anyone can guarantee, but there are things you can do to increase your chances of these happening and the luck you and your app experience.

In the first century AD, the Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” It still applies today. You can’t guarantee the opportunities you’ll have, and you may even have to work to create them. But if they do come and you’re not prepared, you’ll miss out.

You’re more likely to create something lots of people use if it’s something they want. People will share an app more if it’s easy and there’s a benefit. The press and websites are more likely to write about your app if it’s unique, if it’s high quality, and if you tell them about it and ask for a review. Stores are more interested in featuring apps that are new, of high quality, and show the unique features of the platform.

This book is about experience, as that’s the easiest factor for you to control in a way that can be beneficial to your app and help it stand out from the competition. Value is often easy to compete with as functionality is easy to copy. Luck is partially out of your control, so it isn’t something you can rely on. The experience of an app is embedded deep in its design, and that’s the hardest to replicate. But a great, intuitive experience can enhance its value and increase your opportunities for luck.

1.1.4. Great usability experiences are intuitive

Int...