The goal of usability is to optimize the user experience. Usability is about a lot more than just reducing the number of mistakes people make on a web site or to increase the speed with which they can find something. The user experience is infuenced by the total of impressions the user is confronted with on a site. And that includes the subjective feeling a user has on a site. Usability is about making users feel good.

Usability and design: enemies?

A lot of people think usability is only about accessibility and ease of use, not about design. Web designers and interactive marketing agencies especially are often wary of usability experts. They claim usability is synonomous with boring and drab looking web sites.

Of course that isn't true. Although it is true that certain user-friendly sites look a little boring. But is their boring design a consequence of their excellent usability or rather a deliberate choice? Sites like Google, BBC and CNN may not look flashy, but they work. For these sites, functionality and speed are vital. They are quite literally tools. People visit these sites with a purpose.

Content and functionality come first
Actually, all web sites are tools. People visit a web site with a purpose and it's the site's job to help them achieve it. You could compare it to a car. That has a purpose too. Depending on what that purpose is exactly the creative team will come up with a design that fits the purpose and reflects the brand values. All the while staying within the confines of what the basic rules for a car are. The same goes for a web site. First you have to determine what your site's purpose is and what people expect from your site in terms of content and functionality. Then you can focus on creating a design that enhances the site's purpose and appeals to your target audience. You have to know what you're selling before you can wrap it.

The advantage of a user test is that you can see what users do on your web site: where they click, where they falter and where they leave. An added bonus is that you can ask them why. That way, you can make changes to your site based on facts.

Quite often, the design of a site is also talked about during a user test. But these results aren't really reliable. Design is a very personal thing. Also, during a normal user test a user is only confronted with one design so he can only say what he likes and dislikes about that particular design.

If you want valid feedback on design, you should have a specific design test. That means you give the user several designs to discuss. To get a maximum of feedback, it is best to discuss the different elements of the design separately (overall look, colours, links, titles, buttons, …). Always ask the user to motivate his answers: why does he like the buttons on design 1 better than those on design 2? It can be interesting to let the user select his favourites from all the design elements to create his ideal design. It's often surprising to see how practical users think about design elements.

Informed decisions
Just like a regular usability test, a design test gives you feedback from real users. Contrary to user tests focused on functionality or information structure a design test will often yield less uniform results. You'll definitely need more than four users. Our experience shows that ten people can already give you a good indication of what does and doesn't work design wise. Twenty users should definitely be enough to provide you with enough statistics to make informed design decisions.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis