Utility is more important than usability

I’ve long held Jakob Nielsen’s Useful = usability + utility formula in high regard. The Introduction to Usability article it comes from is still one of the best intros to user experience I’ve seen. That said, I’ve recently started to wonder about the ideal ratios on the right side of the equation. What combination of usability and utility results in the most useful product? Is it a 50/50 split? 70% usability, 30% utility? It’s a purely academic exercise because there’s no way to prove any of it, but it did lead me to a theory:

I believe that utility (whether a product provides the features users need) is initially more important than usability (how easy & pleasant these features are to use) in product design.

Let me say right up front that I’m not saying usability isn’t important. I’m just saying that when it comes to a product being used extensively (and payed for) by users, it is more important to get the utility right from the start. Users will struggle through bad usability (up to a point), but they won’t use a wonderfully usable product that doesn’t serve a real need (see Path).

I’ll give two personal examples to back up this view1. My favorite social network at the moment is Goodreads. The site is slow, the UI is confusing, and the mobile apps make me feel completely lost, and yet I keep coming back to it. Because Goodreads is extremely good at what it does: helping me find books I’d enjoy, and letting me share good books with friends.

Goodreads

The second example is Pinboard. If I could take only one website with me to a deserted island it would be Pinboard. I use it more than any other online service. It helps me save, categorize, and find all the useful articles I’ve read over the 5 years I’ve been using it. The UI has tons of little weird quirks, and it’s very much barebones. But that doesn’t matter. It’s indispensable to me, so I care very little about its usability.

Pinboard

These two examples lead me to a second theory:

The more utility a product has, the less its usability matters.

I like Goodreads, but at some point if the usability becomes too frustrating, I’ll just leave. For Pinboard, on the other hand, I’ll walk through usability hell and back just to keep using it. It’s that essential to my work.

I’ve said this a few times in this article, but let me reiterate: I’m not, for a second, saying that usability isn’t important. I’m proposing that if you have a product that has insane levels of utility, its usability becomes a secondary factor in its success. To put it another way, the ROI on increasing utility is probably much higher than the ROI on improving usability.

The moral of the story is this: first find an idea that people can’t live without, then make it a beautiful, usable product. It’s very difficult to do it the other way around.

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15 January 2016

What happens when connected homes disconnect

Nick Bilton quit his Nest Thermostat because a software malfunction left him unable to heat his house for a while. In Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold he extrapolates to concerns about what happens when connected devices stop working as they should:

We’ve seen this before, with wireless fobs for keyless cars. They are supposed to make life easier by letting us do away with car keys, but they also make it easier for thieves to break in (by using a simple radio amplifier).

It also happened recently with Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco asserting that the wristbands failed to “consistently and accurately record wearers’ heart rates,” which is vital for those with certain medical conditions.

I’ve heard dozens of other stories from people with connected homes who were locked out by malfunctioning door touch pads, or about newfangled security alarms going off in the middle of the night because a bug (one with wings, not a digital one) flew by.

This reminds me of Daniel Rivero’s Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. Since companies are starting to require customers to sign agreements that prohibit them from filing law suits in the event of a malfunction, there is no one to hold responsible. Combine this with last week’s The internet of all the things, and I’m suddenly not so keen on this “connected home” thing any more.

15 January 2016

Online chat therapy for online addiction

Sarah Kessler sets out to treat an unproved disorder with an unproven form of therapy, and lived to tell the tale. From What I Learned In 12 Weeks Of Therapy For Social Media Addiction, about using online chat therapy provider Talkspace:

Though everyone says they’re addicted, [Roni Frank, co-founder of Talkspace] says, they aren’t necessarily motivated to solve the problem. She compares it to cigarettes. “In the early years, people were smoking like crazy,” she says, “and at some point, everybody started to be aware of how harmful it is. I think the same thing will happen with social media, and how it is basically promoting poor mental health.”

Social media therapy is not the only aspect of Talkspace that has yet to be fully embraced by the mainstream. The idea that therapeutic help can come from an app, in general, has been met with some skepticism. “Developing a relationship with your patients in online therapies can be a problem, because you can’t see emotional cues,” Madalina Sucala, a clinical psychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has researched how clinicians feel about e-therapy, told The Verge, “and sometimes you can’t convey empathy.”

Filing this in my ever-growing “what a time to be alive” category.

14 January 2016

Solve social problems where you live

Courtney Martin’s essay on The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems really got to me. She makes the case that instead of traveling all over the world to solve social problems in other countries, we should focus on the problems at home:

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems is dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve avoided. While thousands of the country’s best and brightest flock to far-flung places to ease unfamiliar suffering and tackle foreign dysfunction, we’ve got plenty of domestic need. […]

I think there is tremendous need and opportunity in the U.S. that goes unaddressed. There’s a social dimension to this: the “likes” one gets for being an international do-gooder might be greater than for, say, working on homelessness in Indianapolis. One seems glamorous, while the other reminds people of what they neglect while walking to work.

Her proposal is worth considering:

There’s a better way. For all of us. Resist the reductive seduction of other people’s problems and, instead, fall in love with the longer-term prospect of staying home and facing systemic complexity head on. Or go if you must, but stay long enough, listen hard enough so that “other people” become real people. But, be warned, they may not seem so easy to “save.”

14 January 2016

The significance of gif culture

I was lucky enough to see Sha Hwang’s brilliant closing keynote at UX Burlington 2015 about his work on Healthcare.gov. So I was excited to see that Sha just posted a recent talk he did called Digital Materiality, a short reflection on gifs and gif culture:

gifs are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are important: they do not belong to anyone. because of their constraints they become a design material, to be played with, challenged, and explored.

Needless to say, there are some really good gifs in that talk…

13 January 2016

A better way to approach Net Promoter

Back in my eBay days, when Net Promoter was just becoming a huge deal, there came a time when we were asked to include the measurement in our user research. Even then I was extremely uncomfortable with the simplistic nature of the measure, but I just didn’t have the experience to speak up about it. It seems that NPS is finally getting the wind taken out of its sails. The latest takedown I read is Matt LeMay’s excellent On Net Promoter and Data Golems:

This very ubiquity is a huge part of what makes Net Promoter so attractive. It’s a system with an official-sounding name that consistently produces a measurable quantitative output. The score it produces can be easily benchmarked against that of any other company. And this is why, no matter how many times it is critiqued and debunked, Net Promoter only seems to grow in power and pervasiveness. The primary value of Net Promoter is not how effectively it predicts customer loyalty, but rather how effectively it covers your ass.

The main problem with the NPS question—“How likely are you to recommend [product] to a friend or colleague”—is that it’s a data model that doesn’t fit the social model of recommending products.

But by oversimplifying the multifaceted and highly variable human context around recommendation, Net Promoter falls into one of the biggest pitfalls of the “data-driven” age: it puts forth a data model that does not accurately reflect the underlying social model. When’s the last time you thought to yourself “I am likely to recommend this product to my friends or colleagues” as opposed to something like, “I can’t wait to tell my friend Tricia about this new slow cooker because I know that she doesn’t like to cook things on the stove”?

Luckily, Matt provides some really good ways to improve the use of NPS. Is this is something you deal with in your company I highly recommend his article.

13 January 2016

Pretending at closeness

Leigh Alexander wrote a very interesting essay on how Facebook is getting a little… “intimate” with its users lately. She extrapolates that to a growing trend in The New Intimacy Economy:

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals. Start counting how many times platforms, services and websites entreat you in human voices, with awkward humor, for money. Watch as the things we expect to be invisible, utilitarian, start oozing emojis and winky-smileys. Even Silicon Valley, global epicenter of whitewashed empathy voids and 1-percenter sci-fi wank fantasies, is going to pretend it cares about you.

12 January 2016

AAPL the stock vs. Apple the company

Neil Cybart has a very interesting analysis of AAPL, the stock, and Apple, the company. From The Two Apples:

While AAPL investors look at changing revenue sources and Apple entering new industries as risk factors, for Apple such characteristics are normal business and according to plan. It is this divide that will likely continue indefinitely, suggesting it is unwise to expect AAPL to one day begin to follow Apple. Just as a declining AAPL stock price is no indication of a struggling Apple, there will likely come a time when AAPL outperforms peers even though Apple, the company, may be struggling.

The whole article is worth reading if you’re interested in the disconnect between a company that seems to be doing really well, and a stock price that doesn’t reflect that.

Apple Revenue

12 January 2016

Quote: Patrick Rothfuss on the importance of travel

If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.

—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear.

11 January 2016

Entity-relationship modeling as a starting point for product design

It’s been roughly 15 years since I made an entity–relationship model, so it is with great surprise that I sat in a meeting the other day and thought to myself “This project needs an ER model before we can do anything else.” I almost asked out loud, “WHO SAID THAT!?” But once I got over the initial shock I realized that my subconscious isn’t completely full of crap (this time).

But let’s back up. I’m working on a project to combine a variety of different back-end services into a single product. As we were talking about it and the discussion shifted to design, I realized that before we could create user journeys and get started on the interaction design we first needed to understand the relationships between the different entities in those services. I worried that without that model, we’d get ourselves tangled up really quickly.

So I brushed up on my theory1 and got to it. First, the obligatory definition:

[An] entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing the data or information aspects of a business domain or its process requirements, in an abstract way that lends itself to ultimately being implemented in a database such as a relational database. The main components of ER models are entities (things) and the relationships that can exist among them.

This is a tool that’s primarily used as the first step in relational database design. But I found it really useful for us to define the constraints within which we could create user flows. Let me explain with an example. Here’s a simplified version of the ER model we came up with for this project (using Crow’s foot notation):

Entity-relationship model

Each color represents a different back-end service. Here’s a subset of what the diagram tells us:

A team can have multiple tasks, but each task can only be assigned to one team.
A task can have multiple files associated with it, but each file can belong to only one task (or team).
A person can be part of multiple teams, and a team is made of multiple people.
There is a 1:1 relationship between teams, tasks, files, and the conversations about those entities.
Outside of those relationships, a person can be part of multiple conversations, and a conversation can consist of multiple people.

If all this sounds a little bit boring, I hear you, but here’s the power of this diagram: it ensures that whatever UI we come up with serves the underlying entity relationships, and not the other way around. This is huge. For example, if we started with the UI we might say that users can attach files to a task or project within the product’s main interface. But since a 1:1 relationship exists between Conversation and File, it means we can also attach a file to a task by dropping it into the Conversation view of that task. The relationships help us to come up with the most useful and robust UI.

What essentially happens if you start UI design with an ER model is that you create the boundaries of what’s “allowed” in the UI. It pushes you to think up useful ideas without the danger of coming up with something that wouldn’t work in the final implementation.

I don’t think ER models should be the starting point of every project. But in certain specific cases where many disparate products or services need to come together it’s proved to be really useful.

And now, on to journey mapping…

Ok fine, I read the Wikipedia article. ↩