Website Usability

Introduction

     Website usability is this week's topic for our class. It is defined as the ability of a website to provide a well-designed user interfaces that targets the ease-of-use for its users. Usability itself is defined as the study of ease of use, of how quickly a user learns to use a particular human interface. It is defined in five different components:

• Learnability: The ability of a product to enable users to quickly learn how to use it.
• Efficiency: The ability of a product to enable users to how quickly can they perform tasks.
• Memorability: The ability of a product to enable users the ease reestablishing proficiency.
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design? 

   Usability is very important not only to website but also in designing different products. If a website is giving a user a hard time to use, it is pretty much useless. The same thing with different products, if the users can't figure out how to use it, he or she will trash or returned it, therefore results into lost of clients/customers.

Examples of websites that have satisfactory usability:

 

Concerto-Signage

     The homepage of this website pretty much tells you everything about this product and it all fits in your screen without scrolling up and down. It tells you what the product is, why use it and how to download it, and this is only on the first page. All in all, this is a very straight forward page. You don't have to visit other parts/links of the website to find out what the product is all about unless you actually interested in it.

SpeedTest

     SpeedTest.net is a website that tests both the download and upload speed of your internet connection. As soon as you go to the site (1st pic), it automatically finds your location.  The only step that you need to take is click on the "Begin Test" and off you go. After testing, it'll show you the results (2nd pic) nicely and easily. The use of this product is very straight forward and effortless.

Examples of websites that have unsatisfactory usability: 

TheBus HEA

     Although the site and product is really straight forward (just type the location or bus stop and go), it doesn't handle typos very well. A missing single letter on a location will immediately return an error or no result. This will be very frustrating for users who are not familiar or having problem remembering street names here in Hawaii. Not very tourist and elderly friendly.

Citymill

      This whole website is pretty simple, too simple that is. The homepage is just one big advertisement, which I'm guessing a PDF file from the company's weekly newspaper ad. All the pages here are static. It doesn't give you ability to search for products. It gives you some categories, but it only list different types of product and that's it, nothing specific about the products available.