Hit by the Usability bug?? ...Welcome to the Club!

The past few years have seen new concepts come to life and new heights of personal achievements being reached by Indians on the World horizon.

An interesting concept that has caught the fancy of many like-minded progressive individuals is the importance of Usability across various domains.

Usability, per se, as defined by ISO standards, is the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which a specified set of users can achieve a specified set of tasks in a particular environment.

In the real world scenario, its importance has definitely become indispensable.

Being associated with this field for a while now, I have myself seen the benefits of employing Usability into a company’s development lifecycle. Usability is a specialized field that employs various practices like effective Information Architecture creation for enhancing User Experience.

Quite strange that there is a lot of emphasis these days on ‘user experience’. We’re all end-users at some point or the other. But never was it of so much priority for companies to ensure that their customers/patrons revelled in their experience as users of various services on offer by the companies.

It is this wakefulness towards enhancing ‘user experience’ that has given an impetus to companies into channelizing their efforts towards building the best possible Information Architecture and employing Usability as a means towards achieving the same.

In today’s world we can only fathom the immense amount of information waiting to be absorbed by us as Information seekers. But the improper structuring of information across various media not only spells a bad experience for the user but also a direct drop in the business of the stakeholders/clients. Hence, Information Architecture then is an important step towards avoiding such a scenario, for both the concerned segments.

After all, we as humans want to experience the most, in the easiest and quickest way possible. This by nature is how we go about interacting with the world around us. Imagine if you as a user would stand in long queues only so you could get the first-day-first-show tickets to the movie you’d long been waiting for. And what if then, when it’s your turn at the counter, you’re told that there was some unforeseen glitch with the system. So you’re left with nursing a disappointed heart at losing out on enjoying the fruits of your excited wait. Wouldn’t that be unfair to you as an end-user??

But fret not! Make things easy, yet appealing to all, is what Usability as a branch of study does. What if instead, you have the option of sitting back home booking your tickets at a mouse-click and ensuring yourself a ticket to your choice of movie just the way you like it…first-day-first-show??!! Tempting…ain’t it? It not only gets you what you want but also without the otherwise exhausting experience of waiting through long, spiralling queues.

This is just an example of the positivity of this interesting concept called Usability. Today, this concept has spread stealthily into various domains and is helping us to come up with innovative service solutions, be it for web-portals, for intranet applications or any other. Everyone seems to have been bitten by the Usability bug…albeit, for good! The aim being, just one… to create a rewarding alliance between both, the user and the companies providing various services.

THIS is what Usability does! It acts as a smooth facilitator…a bridge of sorts between the User and the service provider. Thereby connecting the two through an experience that could well last a… lifetime! Am I somewhat exaggerating the ‘lifetime’ bit??

Well, maybe not.