“I’ll any day prefer a user who’s a moron with 100$ in his pocket than a Nobel Laureate who is broke” – Anonymous e-tailer.
Usabilty consultants must understand who are the desired users of a software or website, especially if it’s a shopping site where buying and selling happens and money changes hands. Only when they target their usability improvement measures at such users will they be able to convince their customers of the real value of their services.
At the recently held World Usability Day Seminar in Pune, India, several usability gurus shared the insights they’ve gathered from various real-life usability studies and improvement programs they’ve conducted around software products and websites. I was very impressed with the breadth and depth of these insights. For example, I learned that many un-lettered people tend to associate features in a mobile phone with the shape of the words. As a result, they only understand ‘Contacts’ but not ‘Phonebook’. Also, when the Hindi (the most widely spoken Indian language and the native language of the studied people) equivalent of ‘Contact’ was displayed, they couldn’t understand the feature because their association has always been with the shape the word ‘Contacts’ make.
On the other hand, I was somewhat shocked to hear some speakers talking about profiling users by IQ. How does it matter to an e-tailer what is the IQ of a user with 100$ to spend? Usability practitioners should design shopping websites in such a manner that even a low IQ user finds it easy to search, find and order things from the e-tailer’s website. Usability consultants are being self-serving when they take an exclusionist approach of suggesting that they will only design softwares and websites that cater to users of a certain minimum IQ level. With this approach, they’re not going to win much favor with e-tailers who are forking out the money for such usability services. Nor with the user community.
Software and websites designed with this exclusionist mindset tend to put off more users than they attract. e-tailers grappling with low conversion rates on their websites might find it revealing to study problems encountered by users who give up their shopping midway. Click here for my earlier article in which I’d shared some of my experiences and insights on why online shoppers abandon their shopping carts. Just fixing such problems can lead to perceptible improvement in online shopping conversion rates and revenues.
I am not denying that it might be far more difficult to design websites which even low IQ users should find easy to use. But, in my opinion, that is the fundamental challenge of usability. After all, you don’t require usability consultants to design websites for intelligent users who will somehow find a way to navigate through the website and manage to order things they want.
How well usabilty practitioners meet this fundamental challenge and get out of their exclusionist mindset will determine their own reason for existence.