When Did “Ease of Use” Become a Feature?

As one of the Senior Architects at GravityFree, I have the privilege of being able to work with clients who are working to create a new business, or improve an existing business online. I get to assist them in determining the technical feasibility of the ideas they are planning based on time and budget, as well as working through new ideas. There is a request I get asked about half of the time that always makes me ponder a little bit. “I want it to be easy to use.” The statement gets me every time. Who would want to make something more difficult for the people using it? But regardless, everyone seems to be on the marketable “make it easy” bandwagon. With several U.S. organizations having created an “Ease-of-Use” program to encourage the development of user-friendly products, the term often makes it to a product’s feature list. Over the years we have seen a culture of growing feature lists and “Easy to use!” has topped many of them, but what does the phrase mean, how does it reflect software significance, and can it be ensured?

When I think about the idea of an application’s simplicity I can’t help but to believe it’s based on the past experiences that we have with the types of information the application deals with, and an understanding of the visual metaphors and technical idioms (e.g. dropdown menus, pagination, etc.) represented within that application. If I was developing an application for accountants it’s unlikely that I would create wizards and tutorials on how to fill out tax forms as I might if the product targeted the general consumer. Would that make the application unfriendly? Not likely. User friendliness is created based on our understanding of the user or a product and the goals or activities they are participating in. It’s equally important to understand the details of what a user of a product might be doing during its usage. Are they standing?  Walking?  Sitting? Are they easily distracted by something else nearby? If I were designing a product that warmed baby formula it might be wise to build in an automatic off switch so the formula doesn’t get too hot. It’s likely that our target user (a parent or caregiver) may get distracted if the baby begins to cry or needs attention in another room. A doctor checking on patients might use a tablet computer which should have an interface that accommodates them walking around and making notations at the same time reducing the chance for error while entering the information with a pen-type pointer stylus.

The idea that something is easy to use for someone else is really about meeting the consumer’s expectations of what the product should be doing. To do anything else would lead to confusion and in turn be deemed “unfriendly.” At the same time to claim that something is easy to use as a form of marketing can be degrading to the consumer purchasing the product. If a product claimed it was easy to use and a purchaser had difficultly making it function, whose fault is it? Are they just uneducated? They would likely feel stupid and somewhat humiliated. It’s not really the mindset you want a user of your product to have.

So what am I trying to say? Everything should be easy to use based on the context of its usage. Sometimes it may be important for you to introduce things into an application of higher difficulty to slow a user down, reducing their chance of mistakes in the process. Don’t claim that something is easy to use because you find it understandable yourself. Work to understand your users, know why they want to use your product based on their behavior (not their verbal requests). It will be in that research that you’ll be shown much more of what your users will find user-friendly than by just adding it as a feature to “check off the list”.