As usability practitioners, we know it by heart – designing for user experience. Knowing it is one thing, implementing it will take more efforts than you can imagine.

What’s an optimized user experience? How can we create a better user experience? - questions that TG keeps asking myself over and over again. One should notice that it’s about EASE-Of-USE primarily. Users manage to complete a complicated task by a simiplifed process via a tool, regardless it’s an application, a software, a site or a set of hardware tool. Google search, Apple products are great examples to demonstrate a remarkable user experience.

Apple Nano

Quite frankly, most users including TG are lazy bone, we don’t want to spend hours on learning how to transfer a payment in ebanking; and we are taking short-cut to make our life easier.  We are looking for fun-filled and enjoyable experience. Any design that exceeds functional level can possibly be escalated to “Emotional design”, which comes from Donald Norman and his book.

Usability professional’s goal is to deliver an ideal user experience for developing long term relationship, we would like to see users coming back from time to time because they love the tool which is simple enough to use and can save their time and efforts.

We are always asked how to measure user experience? it’s quite a challenge!  A thumb-up or thumb-down approach is far too simple. Throwing out such terminology as perceived affordance, consistence, learnability or memorability would be too subtle, it can hardly satisfy the one who make the investment. They need KPIs to justify the endeavor.

To make them happy, quantitative measures comes at play. it’s difficult to come up with a generic or one- glove-fits-all list as different companies have their own benchmark. In general, TG would use metrics specified in the Common Industry Format (CIF) standard – effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction by using

  1. Error rate and completion rate
  2. Time on task
  3. System Usability Scale (SUS) survey or our own customized survey  

It’s up to the project team how to translate it from usability metrics to company’s or department’s KPIs.

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