Ease of Use

Ease of use is a basic concept that describes how easily users can use a product. Design teams define specific metrics per project—e.g., “Users must be able to tap Find within 3 seconds of accessing the interface.”—and aim to optimize ease of use while offering maximum functionality and respecting business limitations.

“Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t.”

1. Transcript loading…

Designing for Ease of Use can be Complicated

Ease of use is a central usability concept. Usability comprises all user experience (UX) elements relating to the ease with which users can learn, discover content and do more with a design/product. In UX design, usability is a minimum requirement for any successful product, but good usability alone is no guarantee of market success. If you create an easy-to-use interface, though, you can partly tap into emotional design and help users fall in love with it, your brand and the service represented.

Ease of use is frequently at odds with functionality – a balance where functionality sometimes wins. For example, a DSLR camera gives users immense control. The “price”, however, is that users need some photographic expertise – unlike with point-and-shoot smartphones. A vital dynamic in user interface (UI) design is users’ ability to achieve goals without having to consider they’re using a website or app. So, ease of use is an integral part of seamless experiences. Designers typically strive to answer “Can users interact easily enough with the interface to complete their tasks/goals effortlessly?” with “How might we minimize the complexity of what users must do?”.

Author/Copyright holder: Bill Bertram. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

DSLR cameras are usually as simple as possible, for target users.

How to Maximize Ease of Use

Easy-to-use designs are ones which users find so familiar that they’re intuitive. It’s best to start with user research so you can understand your users and the contexts in which they’ll encounter and use your design. When your research helps you gain empathy with users through contextual interviews, observations, etc., you can see what “ease of use” would mean for them. Then, you’ll be able to determine how to map the best functions to their needs. First, you’ll want to consider your users’ goals:

1. Overall goals –What your users want to achieve ultimately – E.g., healthier blood pressure levels.
2. Completion goals –What they expect to have happened after using your product – E.g., lower blood pressure.
3. Behavioral goals –What they would do to achieve the goal without your product – E.g., manually record their daily salt intake if they didn’t have your app.

A key part of maximizing ease of use is to understand the fine details of how users see their own needs, problems, etc. Helpful questions include:

• What are userspreparedto do to reach those goals and any subtasks on the way? – Specifically, what must they do as they progress and why must they do action A before action B, etc.? What expectations do they have at each touchpoint?
• Where would they use this product? – e.g., at home
• How would they use it? – e.g., on a smartphone
• What would prompt them to use it? – e.g., needing to book travel tickets
• What would they expect to find as they move through a process? – e.g., a shopping cart
• What’s going on around them while they use it?– e.g., are they moving around, possibly stressed?
• What obstacles might keep them from using it? – e.g., signal strength issues, other parties must act first.
• What could motivate them to pick your product over a competitor’s? – E.g., they can wear your fitness app and scan food product barcodes with a smartphone.

When you answer these, you can work towards project-specific metrics, such as: “Train users must be able to find travel information within 15 seconds.”

Our homepage features affordances (blue buttons), whitespace and more to optimize ease of use.

Special Ease-of-use Considerations

Here are some helpful things to consider for easy-to-use designs:

• Imagine a “perfect scenario” – When you address questions such as “What if this process magically occurred?” or “What if users had an incredibly knowledgeable helper?” as you begin the design process, you might just discover the easiest path for users to take on their task flows.
• Affordances and natural mapping – Use design principles to make (e.g.) pushbuttons and match users’ expectations for how real-world items work. Instantly recognizable controls should work predictably (e.g., sliders offer smooth adjustment).
• Mobile UX design – When users work on smaller screens and in hectic/uncomfortable environments, they’ll become frustrated far faster than when sitting with their desktops. So, try to discover their expectations, pain points, etc. from using tools such as customer journey maps.
• UI design patterns – Patterns such as wizards, to prepare forms, help reduce stress and hard

• Accessibility – When you maximize ease of use with features that include users of all abilities, your product will likely be more successful among all types of users.

Overall, reality rules – and sometimes you’ll need to make trade-offs for your product to be viable (e.g., avoiding expensive technology to run it on).

Learn More about Ease of Use

Here’s a thought-provoking Experience Dynamics piece examining important ease-of-use angles.

The Practical Guide to Usability

Get Weekly Design Tips

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

Better luck next time!

Do you want to improve your UX / UI Design skills? Join us now

Congratulations! You did amazing

You earned your gift with a perfect score! Let us send it to you.

Check Your Inbox

We’ve emailed your gift to name@email.com .

Do you want to improve your UX / UI Design skills? Join us now

Literature on Ease of Use

Here’s the entire UX literature on Ease of Use by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

How to Design for Ease of Use

Ease of use is something that designers strive for but how can you design for ease-of-use? It’s a common question at the start of projects; “If we’re going to do this well, it will need to satisfy ease-of-use for our customers. What kind of universal metrics can we apply to ensure that the product does just that?”

Someone at IBM said: “Ease of use may be invisible but its absence sure isn’t.”

Universal Metrics for Ease of Use?

Unfortunately for designers there are no universal metrics for ease of use. Each product and project is different. What will define “ease of use” for a spoon is likely to fail to define “ease of use” for a digital camera.

You can define project specific metrics for ease of use. For example, if you were building an MP3 player you might have a target of “The user must be able to find and play their chosen song within 3 seconds of accessing the interface.” Or you could decide; “A user must be able to pause play by any interaction with the interface so that they can deal with any interruption without having to find a pause button.”

How do you Reach These Project Specific Metrics?

That’s a great question and one which you probably, deep down, already know the answer to. We reach project specific metrics for ease of use by conducting user research. We need to know what the user’s objectives are and what they think is reasonable to reach those objectives to define ease of use metrics.

For example; you might want to think about different types of goals for your product and interact, observe, etc. users to see what their goals are in those spheres:

• Life goals – what does the user aspire to in their life? How might your product get them to that goal? What would motivate a user to choose your product over a competing product that achieves this objective?
• Completion goals – what do users expect to happen at the end of using your product? What can you measure when this takes place?
• Behavioral goals – when users undertake achieving the goal without using your product, how do they do it? How can your product mimic that process so that the product is familiar to them? (E.g. it mimics their mental models).

Note: Mental models are the models we all have of things we do all the time. We know that we push buttons, for example, and that’s why so many computer applications have buttons that look like “real life” buttons; they fit the mental model.

Author/Copyright holder: Jurgen Appelo. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

Understanding Ease of Use from a User’s Perspective

If you want to know what ease-of-use looks like from a user’s perspective, without user research, there are a couple of questions you can try to get there through visualization but it’s worth remembering – it is always best to carry out user research on the models you develop through this process; user feedback is essential to product design.

• What if this process took place by magic? If your user could complete their chosen task via the use of magic and no work whatsoever what would the experience feel like? This gives you a “perfect scenario” as a starting point. You can then add the fewest possible additional steps to create the product with the greatest degree of “ease of use” without delivering something from J K Rowling’s imagination.
• What if the user had an incredibly knowledgeable helper to carry out the process? If you imagine that your product is that helper (who is say a very, very smart human being with a lot of experience in reaching that objective) – what would the experience feel like then? Again you can use this to deliver a starting point which you can then add the fewest possible steps to in order to deliver something tangible.

Author/Copyright holder: Pixabay. Copyright terms and licence: Free to Use.

Ease of Use and Commercial Reality

It is important to remember that when designing for ease of use; you may not be able to deliver the perfect experience from a user’s perspective. It’s important to remember the commercial realities of the design process too. If something requires cutting edge technology (e.g. expensive to buy, own and implement) but is only going to deliver marginal returns; it’s unlikely that the business is going to support your efforts to include this technology in your design.

Ease of use cuts both ways and ease of use includes the impact that your work has on the business as a whole. Your designs must be easy to use from a commercial viability perspective to deliver true “ease of use”. This may mean compromises on the way through the design process to balance the demands of your user and your business.

Ease of Use and Functionality

It is also worth remembering that while it sometimes worth sacrificing functionality to provide ease of use that many products sacrifice ease of use for functionality. The most common example of this is the smartphone camera vs. the DSLR camera.

Smartphone cameras are incredibly simple to use and the mass market loves them. Push the camera icon, point the phone (perhaps pinch to zoom) and then push the camera icon again to take the photo. There may be some other basic controls but not very many.

In contrast a DSLR such as those made by Canon, Nikon, Fuji, etc. offers a huge amount of control over the camera experience but it comes at the price of ease of use. You need to learn about lenses, about flash, about controlling aperture, shot speed, ISO, etc. And while there’s no denying that smartphones have many more users than DSLRs – there is still a very healthy market for DSLR cameras. Some people will always prioritize functionality over ease of use while others will always prioritize ease of use over functionality (this assumes that the functionality being offered is useful in some way – useless functionality will never be preferred by users).

Author/Copyright holder: Bill Bertram. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The Take Away

Design for ease of use requires talking to users and discovering what they mean by “ease of use”; there is no “one size fits all” checklist that you can use on projects to determine ease of use in advance. You can put yourself in the user’s shoes when you design for ease of use by asking some simple questions. It’s also important to remember that ease of use must not conflict with business goals and that it may be necessary to sacrifice a certain amount of ease of use to deliver more complex functionality.

References

Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Sindre Wimberger. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Learn more about Ease of Use

Take a deep dive into Ease of Use with our course The Practical Guide to Usability .

Every product or website should be easy and pleasurable to use, but designing an effective, efficient and enjoyable product is hardly the result of good intentions alone. Only through careful execution of certain usability principles can you achieve this and avoid user dissatisfaction, too. This course is designed to help you turn your good intentions into great products through a mixture of teaching both the theoretical guidelines as well as practical applications surrounding usability.

Countless pieces of research have shown that usability is important in product choice, but perhaps not as much as users themselves believe; it may be the case that people have come to expect usability in their products. This growing expectation puts even more pressure on designers to find the sweet spot between function and form. It is meanwhile critical that product and web developers retain their focus on the user; getting too lost within the depths of their creation could lead to the users and their usability needs getting waylaid. Through the knowledge of how best to position yourself as the user, you can dodge this hazard. Thanks to that wisdom, your product will end up with such good usability that the latter goes unnoticed!

Ultimately, a usable website or product that nobody can access isn’t really usable. A usable website, for example, is often overlooked when considering the expansion of a business. Even with the grandest intentions or most “revolutionary” notions, the hard truth is that a usable site will always be the windpipe of commerce—if users can’t spend enough time on the site to buy something, then the business will not survive. Usability is key to growth, user retention, and satisfaction. So, we must fully incorporate it into anything we design. Learn how to design products with awesome usability through being led through the most important concepts, methods, best practices, and theories from some of the most successful designers in our industry with “The Practical Guide to Usability.”