User-centred design: how good is your usability?

If you are working across industry sectors, this question of usability can get complex. There are, of course, some basics that prove valuable for general usability of iMedia sites and we won't repeat those here. Jakob Nielsen's Useit website has an established reputation because of his long involvement in the area and it's a good place to start if you want a comprehensive updated overview.

If you haven't visited his site for a while you'll notice that the usability research area has become divided by business sectors and age groups. Those are telling in that usability guidelines have found variances according to the function and profile of use for the interactive user, be it for web, mobile, or smart phone device.

An increase in usability means more satisfied customers ... means better return from the exchange whether that is monetary or affinity to the brand/information. The increase in awareness of the importance of usability has led to a proliferation of Usability jobs. If you're after a usability job or need pointers for advertising for a usability professional, you can browse various sites and we nominate Total Jobs as another indicator here.

If you're involved in producing UK government related web sites, they have issued new usability guidelines in the past week so you may need to check your offerings to this sector to make sure you'll conform for the future and/or revise your current offerings accordingly. Take a look at the COI for the latest where they cover page layout, navigation, writing content, content elements, forms, search, QA and standards and common pages.

If you're involved with e-commerce sites then there's a timely article on econsultancy's site by Paul Rouke with an eye-catching title, WTF does usability best practice mean?, 27th April 2011. Do take a quick look at the Lakeland research that he notes written up by Graham Charlton 7th April 2011, Ten Best Practices from the New Lakeland website. There you'll see examples from their revised site in action with apposite analysis.

It's been a while coming but the sites influenced by Location-based services have a strong following that is growing because they make good sense to any user. Just think of trying to live without the train arrival and departure board information on your smart phone if you regularly use trains, or sat-nav in your car. What about Google Earth/Street maps/view and their spin-off apps? Social media shared information can lead to business opportunities for local businesses when they may least expect it. Lots of people didn't know where Carlilse/Cumbria is even though they'd bought tickets for an event there online. The anonymous blogger realised that many would be looking for accommodation nearby as well as other services and that if the local businesses hadn't placed a Google map app on their sites they would lose business. See: Location-based- marketing will find its feet this Summer. 20th April 2011

If you are working on smart phone apps then you'll also need to keep up with usability issues specifically related to their use: see Where News Apps Come Out On Top in Ground-breaking App Usability Study, 15th April 2011.

This is why usability experts are in more demand than ever. Do you have some? Do you have an alliance with a specialist company or two? Are you costing usability into your project budget breakdowns and if so how? Usability research methods vary a lot and their costs vary in tandem. Not an easy subject but usability methods will have to wait for another time.

Does an app mean better business?

Two related stories on the BBC web site last week:

• Does your firm need its own mobile app? from April 8th, which asked about use of mobile apps to develop brands.
• Trimming the fat: Tech tips for start-ups at GeeknRolla, on April 4th, which looked at 'trimming the fat' in tech company startups ... including making good use of (you guessed it) mobile apps

As user behaviour gravitates towards hand-held devices it's easy to see that applications to make use of these can be beneficial both inside your business (a kind of intra-app) and outside (an extra-app), especially if you have a requirement that is aided by knowing where the device is located. Such things can be as simple as a properly formatted web page read in a browser on the device but increasingly it's a dedicated piece of stand-alone code that communicates with your backend using some kind of web services protocol.

In many cases, especially internal ones, a browser-based solution will be more cost-effective, especially if you have ready access to web-type expertise. Since you probably need to call upon lower-level programming to write an app for, say, the iPhone this is more costly and tens of thousands of pounds are often bandied about, which will frighten off some smaller companies. It would be nice if easier toolkits were available, with a lower cost of entry but Apple, at least, seem to me to be discouraging such things. On the other hand the number of teenagers writing apps almost in their spare time suggests that it can't be that hard.

What are you doing? Are you having C++ apps written for you; are you coding for web browsers; or are you possibly missing out on a useful tool. Think of this; one of my clients has an inventory of hardware that they need to check against a database to verify compliance with various standards. The ability to wander around the racks of kit with an iPad or even iPhone in hand to check data and do things like correct model numbers is something that will be very useful to them. In this case I think we can use the browser method to do the job and it'll be an interesting task to work on.

Do you have any intra- or extra-apps that you produced for your business? Tell us about it.

The exploding mobile business market – are you on top of it?

You can't make a convincing business case to your clients about moving into mobile apps unless you have the overview of what is happening. You might well be busy developing the latest 'must-have' app, or extending the web presence and branding of some of your clients by linking their offerings to mobile platforms. But, will this mania survive? Will the money dry up?

Someone needs to keep an eye on the overall market and what's happening. There have been recent predictions by market researchers, and we're not saying they have definitive answers, but, there are some insights worth considering. Maybe, these insights might drive some of your conversations with your clients and get them to think strategically about what mobile presence means to them now and in a couple of years.

This FT article summarises a lot of research findings and includes some analysis of these: Enterprise mobility: Machine will speak unto machine, but will it pay?, Stephen Pritchard, 13th Feb 2011

He reckons that although mobile phone-based apps have caught the present imagination and will grow strongly, it is the business-led thrust that will push consumers in the markets of telematics, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, healthcare and security. There is a dual thrust for employing the better broadband availability and geographical analysis of data via GPS systems. He quotes the European Union's telematics research project 'eCall' where every car in Europe would have the equivalent of a black box and in the event of an incident would wirelessly send information from GPS and impact sensors to the emergency services. See the Wikipedia entry on eCall.

Forrester Research produced several reports into Mobile penetration and the possible market sectors of banking, advertising and media messaging at the end of 2010. See a search on 'Mobile' on their site.

And if you can't put the time yourself into strategy research for the emerging mobile channel, there are companies that have their finger on this particular pulse, so to speak. The Mobile Interactive Group offer to educate your clients for you - but I imagine they'd educate you too if you pay them. They claim they've done all the research and offer. 'Mobile Industry Research and Forecasting', 'Business Analysis and Change Consultancy' (relating to businesses developing a mobile strategy), and 'Mobile Program Definition'(related specifically to the business needs identified in the analysis'. See www.migan.com.

The complete mobile picture is built up of device and platform awareness as well as realising the strengths of broadband and GPS because mobile web, cloud computing and embedded data streaming form part of the bigger picture - to say nothing of the features like Augmented Reality (AR) that some tip for the top!

Let's be ready for the next market swing by understanding the consumers' reaction to emerging tech mobile offerings.