6 am shut off the alarm, 7 make coffee, 7:30 check the weather report, 7:45 watch TV news, 8 make a toast, 8:15 adjust the thermostat, 8:30 - drive to work … pay for parking… At office, check business news, check voicemail, send email, check stocks, check schedule for meetings, create a presentation, get some cash from ATM… Finally, go home and do the daily errands…..

Huh! The list is long and never ending…Don’t worry; the intention was not to bombard you with the boring itinerary; it was only to demonstrate just how pervasive usability is in our daily routine. I was pleasantly surprised to know about ‘World Usability Day’ when I stumbled upon the website http://www.worldusabilityday.org/. From alarm clocks and heating controllers, to voice mail and vending machines, in modern times we’re struggling with technology virtually every hour of the day. Each of these things might not have a mouse attached, however in many other respects they are as much of a computer as the one you’re using right now.

“Don’t Make Me Think” is the title of usability consultant Steve Krug’s book. If a website is difficult to browse or use, people quit. If a homepage of a site fails to clearly state the purpose of the company and what users can do with the website, people leave. Quitting is the first line of defense adopted by users when they encounter a difficulty. Imagine - A user cannot find a product on an online shopping portal and a student is unable to locate a course that he intends enrolling for via an online varsity. Result is bad rapport with customers, no improvement in revenues; in a nutshell not much output. What’s the problem? Perhaps, you forgot to test for USABILITY!

Now the question arises - When and how does one work on usability? It plays a role in each stage of the design process. Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the pros and cons. Conduct a field study to see how actual users treat the system. Make paper prototypes and test them. Invest as less time as you can on these initial design ideas because you’ll need to change them all based on the test results. Thereafter, keep refining the design ideas through multiple iterations. Once you hit the bull’s-eye and implement the final design, test it again. Remember, subtle usability problems always keep creeping in during implementation. So, don’t get bogged down. Just try to work around them as much as possible. The best answer of “How?” lies in user testing. Get hold of some representative users, and have them perform representative tasks with the design. Make note of their actions - where they succeed, and where they face difficulties. And use this data to your advantage because in here lies the key!

Like most of us, I love eating cookies…especially Britannia digestive biscuits, and sometimes the rarely found (in India) Oreo cookies. What’s common in their package designs? - open from side, slide tray out, slide tray in. It’s a new concept these days. But the tray design makes it difficult to slide back into package. Due to this usability flaw the package gets caught on grooves of the tray. The design is great from a packaging standpoint in that it keeps the cookies fresh while on the shelf. However, when you take it home, how do you keep the cookies fresh after packet is opened? Straight answer is - put it in a ziploc pouch. No re-seal ability and no way to shove the plastic tray back into its packaging is really annoying for me as a consumer. Now, how does this cookie packaging apply to a website’s usability and design? Sites are designed by engineers with business rules in mind, just like packaging is done by a packaging engineer with shelf-life dates to take care of. It must meet certain technical standards. However, technical standards do not take into consideration how consumers will actually interact with the product. So, test your site with your target audience and the average consumer who is not tech savvy - in mind. Doing so, will open your eyes to the way customers interact with your creation everyday.

As our first blog post rightly said - we at QA InfoTech empathize completely with our customers and consider all use cases and situations that the product will face once it goes out in the real world. This unique attribute of ours lets us have our way with ‘Usability’. Be it mobile testing, globalization testing, load testing, website testing or eLearning application testing - we honor the importance of usability in each of these areas that are important to our customers. Our drive to serve our clients better, state of the art labs, abundant knowledge base through user experience and valuable human resources have paved our way to success as a reliable Usability testing partner. So folks, Think Noble, Think Usable! And should you have any queries and issues we’re here to serve you…

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