I personally struggle with anything which is hard to use. Some years ago I thought it must be me when I couldn’t manage to use a product. But now, since I got into usability testing (I am in charge of usability testing at proimpact7) I realized that it wasn’t me at all. It was because often the people behind hard to use products hadn’t conducted any usability testing on real users and they simply produced an unusable product.

I am going to write about two usability examples: software usability and web site usability.

Let’s start with the first one, the software usability example. Currently I have been testing 2 video recording applications, one costing $250 and the other $175.
So I downloaded the 30 day FREE trial of the $250 software first, as I read something about it. To record movie was basically very easy, but the biggest challenge I found was saving the recording and editing it. Even after 14 days I was struggling to do so and I found it a very frustrating task. Just to illustrate how bad it was, let me describe my reactions. Generally I am very patient person, but if something doesn’t work for me within 10 min then as far as I am concerned it’s broken, period. With this particular software anytime I had to save the recording, there was a problem and I wasn’t able to save it and either I lost my recording or it was saved in a format I didn’t want.. And now I am not kidding, I was jumping in the room like a furious tennis ball when this happened third time. And when this happened to me the fourth time then…….I had enough and decided to test alternative software from a different vendor as well.

OK, so the $175 software, doing exactly the same video recording and editing was easier for me to use, and most importantly saving and editing the video is a breeze, so on that basis, have bought it. And there was no jumping like a furious tennis ball in the room!

Conclusion: The first software ($250) I tested was completely useless. If the vendor did usability testing on the product before they launched, very likely this wouldn’t happen and I would have purchased their product. The second, on the other hand, was so easy to use that I loved it from the start, so I bought it. Why it was so easy to use? They have probably done their homework well and did some usability testing.

What’s the moral of this story?  One thing you want to understand, I wasn’t buying on price, and if the $250 software had worked as it should then I would have bought it right away. The bad usability killed the sale in this case, not the price. Remember, always do usability testing and you will have more happy customers.

Usability testing isn’t that expensive, starting at £750 for 10 test users at proimpact7, and if done and all the issues fixed, then it could save you many sales.

Read the part 2.