Usability

what is usability and why should you care?

Usability? We've been doing usability so long, it's a bit tricky for us to estrange ourselves from it long enough to define it and explain it.

First, a definition: usability is the word people use to describe the ease with which people can employ any artifact. Of course, today and esepcially to us, it refers to the ease with which a website, application or software interface allows users to meet their own goals or the intended goals of the product. Usability is also a term for the methods used by usability companies such as ours to ensure the efficiency of technology products. The industry also goes by a variety of other names such as human-computer interaction, user interface engineering and many other variations.

Usability 101

Usability measures a variety of factors related to the overall efficiency of a product, and it usually focuses on the interface design: where user meets product. Factors that contribute to the overall usability of a product are as follows:

• Interface learnability: how easily can a user accomplish the basic tasks he or she wants to, in his or her first encounter with the interface's design?
• Overall efficiency: how quickly and completely can users accomplish tasks?
• Design errors: are there design errors or misleading elements that cause users to fail in task completion? Are there even missing pages, elements or broken links?
• Overall satisfaction: How pleasant does the user truly find the layout, design and features?

Investigation and standards
We outline Interpix Design's usability methods throughout the pages of our site, so we invite you to click around to fully investigate our services in web usability, user testing and all other usability methods.

Usability history
Being the geeks we are, we can't talk about usability without mentioning Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen authored the two seminal works in usability and is absolutely a pioneer in the field, to this day.

We've been fortunate enough to be involved in the usability industry relatively early in its inception so now we are seasoned usability veterans, with over ten years experience. we had the plaeasrue of working on many of the early interfaces for online banking by the companies In Toronto. We've seen the web through its initial growing pangs into developments of web 2.0, mobile, social media applications (and the numerous other fronts of expansion today) and we look forward to building on that history for many years to come as the Internet continues to expand, shift, evolve and mature.

Let us help you develop products that offer your customers and users irresistible usability. Call us today.