Usability Design

Usability Design versus User Interface Design

Back just a few years ago, computers weren’t powerful enough to waste time with graphics. Screens weren’t capacious enough to waste space with blank areas. Times have changed.

Where before programmers could concentrate on providing raw functionality, now we have the resources to worry about how to present that functionality to make it easier to use and make it more pleasant to use.

However, making it easier to use and making it more pleasant to use are two different disciplines, one is usability, or user, design and the other is user interface design. And there is room for confusion on this terminology. Usability design tries to make the presentation suitable for the work and the workers. UI design is often an exercise in making screens more attractive, but not necessarily easier to work with. To make it easier to discuss the differences, I’ll write “usability” for the usability design work and “UI” for the presentation work.

UI designers are relatively common because, I’m being sarcastic here, they’re artists who are slumming. Usability designers are a breed of industrial designers and are much rarer, and more expensive. Usability designers have to work closely with the users and the programmers to get the flow of screens and procedures right.

Programmers sometimes dismiss UI designers as adding ‘eye candy’ that looks nice but has no substance. And indeed, some UI designers do little more than take an existing web page, adjust the field layouts, add some color and graphics and call it a day.

Now, you want UI designers. Making your product attractive is desirable, just don’t think that UI design is usability design or that a UI designer is a usability designer.

Examples of Usability Issues:

- Does the user need to scan the system for large amounts of information at once? Eg stock market brokers, call center operators, emergency dispatchers.  They do not have time to go scrolling around a bunch of screens, or even taking hands off whatever else they’re doing to punch a keyboard or scroll a mouse.

- Is the computer system central to their work, or peripheral?  That is, are they sitting there foresquare to the computer, or is the computer off to the side?

- Is the user intensely familar with the system or just a casual, or even a novice user? (Example: programmers tend to spend most of their time using their IDE—Integrated Development Environment, one piece of software of managing the project and coding code).

- Is the user interrupt driven (e.g. they take phone calls all day) or process driven (e.g. they have specific jobs they do.)

- Does the user work with one application or do they have to switch among several and draw from each to get a task done.

- Is the user a heads-down worker (they don’t even look at the screen to enter data) or a heads-up worker (they can see the prompts).

- Is the user better off not using a computer? Is a scanner or cell phone or ??? a better input/output device?