Introduction
If you've been reading our company blog this week you'll know that we've resumed development of our PHP eCommerce solution, StoreSuite. Just like all of our products, StoreSuite will run through a web browser. It is a complete eCommerce solution with an integrated shopping cart, members area, control panel, inventory management system, etc. We're hoping to have it out by Q4 2007.
Because StoreSuite will provide anyone with a complete eCommerce-enabled website, usability plays a massive role in designing the application. In this article I want to touch on some usability issues that I find important when developing our software. I also want to give you an "insiders view" of how we develop our software here at Interspire.
If you design websites or even software yourself, you should be able to take the ideas and principles I discuss and implement them into your own projects.
What is Usability?
To me, usability is when something just "feels right". You don't need to pick up a manual to learn how to use a product that has great usability. You can go to a usable website and navigate around without getting confused. Similarly, you can jump into a Ferrari and feel the wow factor. Design is a form of usability and Ferrari are the kings of "car usability".
When something is usable you don't have to think how to use it. This means there is very little to no learning curve, which grows your confidence in the company that created the product. This confidence may ultimately lead to you purchasing other products from that company because you've come to expect a high level of usability from past dealings.
Compare this to being a web designer. You build a visually appealing and usable website. If someone visits that site and sees your "Powered by" link at the bottom, don't you think there's a huge chance they'll remember and/or contact you when they need a website in the future?
Usability breeds familiarity which leads to a positive user experience. If there were two websites that contained exactly the same information and graphics, the website that was the most usable would win more sales every time.
Usability Online
The difficult thing with usability is that it's subjective - you might think a horizontal menu on a web site is easy to use, while I might prefer a vertical one - so you have to aim to make something usable for the overwhelming majority of people, because no matter what you do you'll never please everyone.
Before starting the design of a web site or piece of software, you should look at examples that exist in the real world. If you're about to design a Windows application then look at the usability of popular Windows applications such as Skype, MSN messenger, Outlook, MYOB, etc.
Which design elements and objects make these pieces of software usable? Why? If you make a list of 10-20 things you'll have a great foundation for your own Windows application.
It's similar for web sites. If a client wants you to build a complete eCommerce website from scratch, then spend a few days (yes DAYS) getting intimate with Amazon, Shopping.com, eBay, etc.
Critique these sites from head to toe and come up with a list of features or strategies that you think make them usable. You can even copy a lot of usability features from sites like these, including:
Companies like Amazon have spent millions of dollars on usability testing, so doesn't it makes sense to take what's working for them and make it work for you?
The best way to test if something is usable is simple. Get a few friends without design backgrounds and ask them to perform an action using your website or software. For example:
Note down their responses. As you ask more and more people to test your website or software application you should start seeing trends. Find the issues that are common amongst the most people and start working to fix them. This is how we operate as a software company with tens of thousands of customers, so it works whether you've got just a few customers or a few thousand.
Planning for StoreSuite
Usability is a big consideration as we're building StoreSuite. The good news for us is that we already have an established set of usability guidelines that are consistent between our products. This made creating the StoreSuite control panel easy.
In terms of StoreSuite's front-end where people would see products, place orders, etc, we've started with the foundation of an existing ArticleLive template which has been tweaked. You can see it here. This might not end up as the default template when we release StoreSuite, but it will be included as a complete template anyway.
I'm responsible for the overall design and usability strategy for StoreSuite, and so far we've followed the exact strategies I talked about earlier in this article and it's working great.
When we design the shopping cart part of StoreSuite for example, we will look at our own shopping cart on Interspire.com because we like how it feels - it's simple and logical. We'll also look at Amazon, BestBuy.com, CDUniverse.com and probably 10-20 other eCommerce sites to see how their shoppping cart looks and works. We will take the best parts from all sites and implement them into StoreSuite.
Truth be told that's how we've developed all of our applications so far - look at what's already out there and working, note down the best features, make them better and combine them with our own ideas and customer feedback to form a completed product.
The phrase "why re-invent the wheel?" applies to software and web sites just like it does to everything else. If there are already numerous working implementations then why start from absolute scratch, especially in terms of usability?
Conclusion
Usability is the number one factor when designing anything, especially software or web sites. In most industries the product with the best design or ease of use will be the most profitable, because people don't have the time or patience to learn how to use a new product; they want something that's familiar and doesn't require a user manual to get started.