It may be observed that when a website or product is usable, but not useful, it's unlikely to get off the ground. Useful is what generates the interest, serves a need, scratches an itch. Often useful can do without being usable. If your website page has large content that is "useful" for the user making an informed decision/action, you may have to sacrifice on the usability by allowing horizontal/vertical scroll and pop-up/navigation elements. Another standard usability principle suggests alphabetical order of drop-down menus, which is usable in nature, as the users can do without additional cognitive load in narrowing down their choice of action. However, if an unsorted but prioritized menu items are presented to the users based on the most useful options presented first; the system might prove to be more useful after all.
Few Examples of Useful but Low on Overall Usability:
- ecademy
- Most Torrent / Freeware Download sites
- craigslist
- experts-exchange
- only batteries
- flickr
- salesforce (App not Website)
- exactitudes
- igluski
As usability and UI practitioners, we cannot be content to paint within the lines drawn by customers and the known patterns of usability. We must courageously and creatively question the usefulness of the system and functionalities and the user interface elements. Thus, we seek to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.
Watch this space for examples of next usability dimension: Usable.
Excellent post! Since there are many angels to usefulness, it will be great to have your take on some of these sites as to how these compromise on usability yet are useful.
ReplyDeleteThanks Radha. Yes, there are subjective flavors to the different aspects of usability. Hoping to add more insightful and detail-oriented features in future.
ReplyDelete