Why good usability starts with understanding your users

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The purpose of functional software is for it to be used by someone to achieve a goal. It might be to complete a task, perform an activity, access information or just to enjoy an experience. 

Knowing what a user wants to do and why contributes to the design of impactful usability tests. Without this understanding, usability testing can become guesswork. 

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By conducting these 3 activities, you’ll create meaningful tests that are easier to analyse and quicker to create: 

• Understand user needs
• Identify tasks
• Determine success criteria

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Understand user needs

Let’s start with why we design and build software. It’s not for us, the creators, it’s for our users. There are many things that are possible to build but building the right thing that is going to meet your users needs requires research, discipline and being comfortable with throwing away ideas.

It can be common to see business needs disguised as user needs but these are not the same.

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A user need is not: 

“I need to adopt your new product” 

or 

“I need to understand your feature”

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These are business goals and while important, not user needs.

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A user need might be something like: 

“I need to make sure that I don’t miss a delivery” 

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It is then the team’s job to make sure that the experience is discoverable and understandable so the user can clearly see how the solution solves for their needs.

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User needs are best uncovered through qualitative research activities like: 

• Contextual interviews
• Diary studies
• In-field research

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Example

You are performing research for a courier company, trying to understand why a high number of packages that require a signature for delivery are returned to the depot.

During an interview with a customer who recently had a package returned they say: 

“I know you sent me an email in the morning telling me that the package will be delivered today so I’m at home. I wait and wait and it feels like the one moment when I decide to go out into my back yard and can’t hear the door bell, that’s when you arrive and I miss it” 

From this we can identify some potential problems: 

• Accuracy of delivery time - ‘today’ is too broad to be useful
• Notification of delivery - a door bell alone can be an unreliable notification system

These are our problems to solve. You’ll notice that they don’t imply a solution like ‘send a text’ because there could be many different solutions depending on environmental context and constraints.

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Identify tasks

User needs inform the functional tasks to be completed in order to use a system and solve a problem. 

Keep in mind that not all problems need to be solved with software. Sometimes there could be a systems or process change that more easily solves a problem than a new product, feature or service. 

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The next question to ask is:

 What does the customer have to do? 

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Example

The team has decided that the most important problem to solve is the accuracy of delivery time. Other research indicates that the best time window for the business to significantly reduce the number of packages returned to the depot is 1 hour. 

We will need the customer to: 

• Confirm their 1 hour delivery slot

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Again, this task is solution agnostic. No matter what design solution we come up with, a user should be able to complete this task. This can go directly into our usability test.

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Determine success criteria

When you know what success looks like, pain points are much easier to recognise. I like to frame it as ‘what good looks like in this experience’. 

We can take insights from our user research and put it into our success criteria when thinking about a solution and what we want the user experience to be like. 

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Example

Let’s go back to what the customer said: 

“I know you sent me an email in the morning telling me that the package will be delivered today so I’m at home. I wait and wait and it feels like the one moment when I decide to go out into my back yard and can’t hear the door bell, that’s when you arrive and I miss it” 

Success criteria for this experience could be: 

• User feels confident about when the package will be arriving

• User feels they can plan their day without fear of missing the delivery

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This way, if we observe uncertainty or hesitation in our usability test, it’s a signal that we haven’t quite achieved a successful user experience and to probe further.

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Conclusion

Great usability doesn’t start with testing, it starts with understanding users.

Taking the time to identify user needs, keeping business goals separate, identifying tasks and creating thoughtful success criteria will all improve the quality and speed of your usability testing. 

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Need Help?

If you’re new to usability evaluations or want expert input, we’d love to support you. Whether you're looking for advice or a full independent review, get in touch - we’re here to help make your product better.