Usability: the elevator speech

I’ve been having an interesting time recently trying to develop a knowledge base of marketing collateral we can use to sell usability services to people who don’t know what usability is. This is one tall order.

People who already get usability seldom have to worry about this. The internet, I’ve found, is full of definitions and pep talks about usability. These are generally written by people who use acronyms like UIX and UCD as though they were part of common parlance. They are not. Some of these definitions I used to think were pretty useful, till I met Keith.

Keith is many things, and one of them is a ‘sales guru’. He can really sell stuff, and like all good salesmen, he does this by reading people, working out what floats their boat, and then floating it for them. Keith and I are trying to nail the ‘thing’ that will sell usability to corporate clients, and to my surprise, we haven’t nailed it yet.

Keith’s point, and it’s a good one, is that most of the existing definitions require you to know what usability is in order to unpack the terms used to define it - and the rest of the definitions are fundamentally uncompelling. His sales targets, if they get it, still tend to go…

So what…?

Either they don’t see the point of it, or they think they already have it covered.

I’ve made a little progress – but its slow going. The good thing about Keith is that not much impresses him, because he seems to have heard it all before. So I thought I’d share the few things that are starting to gel.

• Usability is advocating for real product users in the design process.

The pop-up toaster story helped here. Imagine the original manual electric toaster as designed by engineers who only made toast in the lab. Controlled conditions, no distractions, perfect toast. The pop-up toaster, on the other hand, was designed by engineers who had talked to your mother about how she actually uses the toaster. In a family kitchen – uncontrolled chaos, five things happening at once, no chance to monitor the cooking process. The pop up toaster doesn’t burn the toast because real users’ needs and actual conditions of use were made central to its design.

• Usability is not the same as quality assurance.

I told Keith: “Just because it’s not broken doesn’t mean people can actually use it”. That turned on a light. People are always assuming usability is QA or accessibility or other means to ensure products work. The important thing is to stress that while that’s all necessary, it’s not enough on its own. I told Keith to imagine he had just bought a new VCR. It’s in perfect working order, fresh out of the box, but after an hour he still can’t programme it to record the final of the Sopranos that evening, because the interface and all the documentation are not designed to help real users perform real tasks. That’s not at all usable, but not because its broken.

• A usable product is one that pretty well anyone can pick up and use first time.

If you want a definition of a usable product, ask: “Can you; a. take it out of the box and start using it straight away - or; b. do you need to take a class first?” If the answer is “a.” – it’s usable. Usable products are intuitive, they either show you what you have to do just by looking at them – or you can work it out by just trying to use it once. In New Zealand the best online example is the auction site TradeMe – everyone, from computer geeks to your grandmother, can use TradeMe first time.

I was starting to feel we were near having this nailed, till Keith said: “We still don’t have an elevator speech”.
An elevator speech apparently is the two minute speil you give the person in the lift on the way up to your hotel room, when they ask: “What do you do?” I’ve been trying, but I still haven’t come up with one that really has traction. The key is, can the other person go away afterwards and say one sentence starting: “I just met a guy who…” If they can’t sum it up that simply, after hearing it once, then it’s not an elevator speech.

I’ll let you know when I’ve got it.