What exactly is a Usability Issue?

Wednesday 31 August 2011 - Filed under Usability News

What is meant by a usability issue? Firstly it’s a very wide ranging term. When describing what usability ‘is’ there’s alot of ‘anything’s.

Anything that hinders or prevents task completion.

Anything that distracts someone or takes them off task.

Anything that allows for confusion to develop.

Anything that causes error.

Taking someone’s attention away from something that was intended to be noticed.

Something which causes you to perform the wrong action.

Misinterpretation of content.

Something which creates navigation confusion.

One key area to consider when trying to establish usability issues is what they will be used for. The most popular use is an Iterative design process with the ultimate goal of improving the product. With this in mind it’s logical that the most useful usability issues are the ones which indicate to areas for product improvement. It’s also safe to say that they must be as easy to implement as possible. When the usability issue does not give a very precise pointer it can still give useful information that can be developed, for example I read in a recent usability report that ‘”the organization’s model theory does not match the user’s model theory”. This could be a very important observation in some way because ultimately it points to a fundamental product flaw, but it gives little remedy or direction to the person who gets the report.
The other side to this is if a report were to say for example ” a user was confused by the product navigation bar and had to click and guess where their wish list was”. Particularly if this issue is backed up by examples of different users experiences, it could prove to be very useful and easy to fix.

Not all usability issues result in negative feedback, often positives can come out of usability data whereby the product may exceed a users expectations, whether its more easy to use than expected or has a better efficiency, these revelations are usually referred to as usability ‘findings’ as ‘issues’ usually makes you think of something negative.
Positive findings can be anything from complex information that’s displayed in a clear and simple format to user’s being educated about the product as effortlessly as possible

One of the biggest challenges facing usability professionals is distinguishing between genuine usability issues and those which are aberrations. Most of the time it’s safe to say that the issues user’s encounter are more often than not genuine usability issues, but what if only 1 in 10 users gets confused by the navigation or a piece of terminology. It’s not an obvious issue but how do you decide whether to ignore it or act on it? Well there’s no conclusive answer but if you try to establish logic and reason behind why the user did what he did then even if only 1 in 12 spotted it there may still be an issue. Think also about the user’s behavior, though process and perception. The flip side though is that if there is no rhyme or reason behind the actions and no convincing explanation can be established then it’s probably menial and should be ignored.

So how do you identify an issue? Well the best way is to either have interaction with the participants via some kind of technology or receive data by an automated method like an online study. You can also take into consideration any issues that are likely to be encountered and monitor them through the study. Testing user surveys look for specific metrics and establish patterns based on this but we also keep an open mind where any ‘surpises’ in the data are scrutinized.

A usability issue may start out as a little bit of confusion or a departure from what the provider thinks is the ideally behavior. This can be when the testing user expresses any confusion before he has actually encountered a problem. An example of this is where say a user goes through a step by step installation process maybe to install some software only to realize at the end of the process a mistake had been made. In this scenario the usability issue began when he or she departed from the ideal process.
So when does an issue end? Well these situations are few and far between. The most obvious is simple task failure where the participant either admits they did something wrong or gives up when a facilitator asks them to move on to the next task. Another situation where a usability issue ends is where another issue replaces it or a different problem arises. This new problem does however have to be significant enough to overcast the previous and be the driving force behind that users behavior. There are isolated incidents when the user recovers from the issue by either having a “eureka moment” or backing up a few steps and finding a solution. Though rare in my experience these eureka moments can be quite useful as they can tell you exactly what their user perception was and why they were confused.

Usability issues also vary in severity. Some don’t even inconvenience or frustrate users they just result in them making the wrong decisions or lose data. Severity ratings do though allow usability analyists to prioritize usability issues and thus have a more positive impact on design. You can categorize these severity ratings into two broad groups either severity based purely on the impact of the user experience and those which try to incorporate multiple dimensions into the system. These can include predicted frequency of use, impact on business goals and the impact on the user experience. You can categorize the priority of the usability issues in three simple categories low, medium and high.
Low would be an issue that is frustrating to the user but is not directly involved in task failure. They may reduce efficiency or lead a user off course but they are easy to recover from and tasks still get completed.
Medium would be an issue that contributes to task failure but does not solely prevent it from being completed. Effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction are all effected but not drastically as participants often develop ways to get around them.
High is an issue that either directly and or solely leads to the failure of a task. The impact on effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction is significant.

2011-08-31  »  Sam