Making things usable: A Usability Primer
Written by April CabelloLet this be our own version of Usability 101. In the Asian region, usability is not a pervasive practice. User-centered design is in its early stages, which makes it difficult for other people to understand it. The concept seems complex that in fact, when friends or acquaintances ask me what I do for a living, I always get a puzzled look when I say I’m a usability professional.
To define usability, I always refer to ISO 9241-11 (Guidance for Usability):
“Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”
From this definition, usability is measured by the following components:
- Effectiveness – if users can achieve specific goals in a product with accuracy and completeness;
- Efficiency – the amount of effort that the user needs to exert in order to achieve the goals in a product; and
- Satisfaction – “the feeling that comes when a need or desire is fulfilled.”
For Jakob Nielsen, usability is defined as a “quality attribute” which measures how easy to use a user interface is. It is also a set of methods for improving ease-of-use in product development.
Expanding the components above, Nielsen defined usability with five (5) components, which I personally call LEMES:
- Learnability – the degree of ease or difficulty that users experience in fulfilling the basic tasks in a product during the first time they encounter it;
- Efficiency – the speed to which users perform the tasks once they have learned the design of the service;
- Memorability – how easy it is for users to remember how to use the service after not using it for a period of time;
- Errors – the number of errors users make and how they can recover from the errors when using the service;
- Satisfaction – if the product is pleasant and/or fun to use.
Simply put, usability ensures that a product or service is easy to use.
No matter the jargon, usability puts users at the forefront of design. Usability makes sure that the design process is user-centered and that the product or service resulting from the design is useful, usable and relevant to the intended users.
I hope this sheds a little bit of light on what usability is all about. Perhaps, I will encounter less puzzled looks this time around. 
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