Usability in UX design is a strong mix of both ease-of-use and user satisfaction. According to the ISO 9241-11 standard, usability is described as “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. ”. Having usability in a product is important due to the overarching competition in todays landscape with products. If a user has trouble using a product, they are more likely to seek an alternative solution.
Research shows that users who experience bad UX designs in websites will leave due to poor design or navigation, along with lack of effective messaging, and lack of contact information.
Five critical criteria’s recommended by the Usability Professionals’ Association state that a product must meet:
- Effectiveness
- Efficiency
- Engagingness
- Error Tolerance
- Ease of Learning
Effectiveness
Effectiveness is about whether a user can complete their goals with a high degree of accuracy. For example, a credit card input field form should be as informative as possible in a meaningful way to the user such as the design should only allow a certain amount of digits to be entered to reduce data entry errors.
Efficiency
Efficiency is all about speed and how fast a user can get their task completed. Let’s take note of an example with Amazon.com. Essentially with an active account, your shipping and payment information is already saved, so from adding an item to your cart to checking out, it only takes three clicks to place your order. That is efficiency.
Engagingness
Engagement is all about proper layout, readable typography, and ease of navigation. These combined elements produce pleasant and gratifying experience to the user.
Error Tolerance
Error tolerance is all about minimizing error by allowing the user to easily recover from an error and get back to what they were doing. For example, restricting opportunities to make errors or offering an “undo” feature.
Ease of Learning
It is no surprise that people using your product will come from all sorts of backgrounds. The product should be designed in such a way that anyone who uses the product again should naturally be able to use it as second nature.