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Mind the Product

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Jock Busuttil (jockbusuttil.com) is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals. In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited (productpeo.pl), which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS). Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management (jockbusuttil.com/#book), which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK. He writes the blog I Manage Products (imanageproducts.com) and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD (producthead.news). You can find him on Twitter (@jockbu) and LinkedIn.

Freelance Head of Product, Coach, Author & Speaker

Jock Busuttil

<p><a href="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/jock_busuttil.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/jock_busuttil-300x225.jpg" alt="" title="jock_busuttil" width="300" height="225" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-307" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/jock_busuttil-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/jock_busuttil.jpg 800w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>Quite a few people are put off usability testing because they think it&#8217;s complicated, time-consuming and expensive.  What you may not realise is that you can run a set of usability tests in a <strong>single afternoon</strong> that will uncover <strong>eighty percent</strong> of the problems your product has.  And the only specialist equipment you&#8217;ll need is a pen, some paper and the computer you need to access the software or website.</p>
<p>This my friends is <strong><em>lo-fi usability testing</em></strong> &#8211; a high-return, low-cost method for these cash-strapped times.  In this first instalment, I&#8217;ll be discussing what usability is and why testing it is so important.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Our assessment of a product&#8217;s usability is subjective.  It depends on many factors: visual cues, familiarity or similarity to something else we&#8217;ve experienced, and so on.  While there no absolute measure of usability, what is clear is that some products are far easier and pleasant to use than others.  What is more, these more usable products tend to be the successful ones.</p>
<h2>So what do we mean by usability?</h2>
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<p>You know your product is usable when users intuitively understand what it is for and how they should use it.  It is also a good sign when people <em>enjoy</em> using your product.  This is likely to indicate that your product will save the user time or at the very least give them a pleasant distraction from whatever it is they&#8217;re meant to be doing, rather than being a source of frustration and delay.</p>
<h2>Perfection is <em>unattainable</em>.</h2>
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<p>But don&#8217;t let that put you off.  We can nevertheless attempt to get close.</p>
<p>Think about it this way:</p>
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<li>Market needs and problems change &#8211; people weren&#8217;t worrying about how to tweet before Twitter existed</li>
<li>User expectations change &#8211; do you remember how sloooooow everything was before broadband?</li>
<li>The bar is continually raised by innovative products and websites &#8211; things are generally getting easier to use; hurray!  But if you&#8217;re complacent about usability, you&#8217;re risking being left behind by your competitors.</li>
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<p>What is considered to be good usability is not only subjective but also continually in flux, so we need to keep re-evaluating and improving our products and websites.</p>
<p>So why do we need to <em>test </em>the usability of our products?</p>
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<h2>Evidence</h2>
<p>Generally speaking, you&#8217;re going to need to convince someone that it will be worthwhile to make changes to your product.  Whether that someone is the budget holder who needs to justify the financial expense of making those changes or the developer who refuses to accept that their &#8216;baby&#8217; is in any way imperfect, simply saying &#8220;this product could be better than it is now&#8221; is not going to cut the mustard.  In other words, you&#8217;re going to need <em>evidence </em>to convince people a change is needed.</p>
<h2>Your opinion is irrelevant</h2>
<p>The next revelation is that we, as product managers, are not right about everything.  Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing fame often uses the phrase, &#8220;your opinion, though interesting, is irrelevant&#8221;.  Guess what?  He&#8217;s pointing at us product managers when he says that.  We’re usually* not the target users and our products are not our vanity design projects.</p>
<p>* There&#8217;s always one smart-ass product manager who is responsible for requirements or backlog management software.  Yes yes yes, very good.  Now sit down.</p>
<h2>Fresh eyes</h2>
<p>When you come to a product or website you&#8217;ve never seen before, it takes you a little while to learn its quirks until you become proficient at using it.  The problem is that you&#8217;re now working unconsciously around the usability problems.  So you need to rely on fresh pairs of eyes to spot the things that you, your developers and other proficient users are automatically compensating for.</p>
<h2>Don&#8217;t assume, check</h2>
<p>We spend our time voicing the needs of our customers within our organisation.  Consequently, it&#8217;s all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking we <em>know </em>what our users need without bothering to <em>ask </em>them.  Usability testing forces us to find out how our users are working with our products.  I will guarantee you that every set of usability tests you run will reveal at least one wholly new insight.</p>
<h2>We&#8217;re moving the goalposts&#8230;</h2>
<p>Over time we evolve our products and add new features that we believe are of value to our customers.  However, without understanding the effect these new features will have on the overall usability of the product, there is a risk your &#8216;improvement&#8217; is in fact the reverse.  One extreme example of this was a data entry product I managed where the addition of a single mouse click in an otherwise keyboard-driven process meant a ten percent reduction in productivity.  Multiplied by hundreds of data entry clerks, the cost implication would have been massive.</p>
<p>We took the mouse-click back out again.</p>
<h2>&#8230;and so is everyone else</h2>
<p>User needs and problems change.  Consider for example the impact of social media on information exchange.  Even if you&#8217;ve made no changes to your product, your users and the other products they use are gradually becoming more sophisticated.  As soon as one product raises the bar for usability, everything else seems second-rate by comparison.</p>
<h2>When in Rome</h2>
<p>Different territories, countries and cultures do things in different ways.  They have different keyboard layouts, different expectations and assumptions.  You had better check to see if any of this is going to have an adverse effect on their ability to use your product or website effectively.</p>
<h2>Remember: perfection is unattainable</h2>
<p>Our products are not perfect, they can always be improved.</p>
<p>That covers the &#8216;why&#8217; and &#8216;what&#8217; of usability testing.  Next time, we&#8217;ll get down to the practicalities of what you need to do to prepare for running a set of usability tests.  Thanks for reading.</p>

core/freeform

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Lo-fi usability testing – Part 1: Background

Jock Busuttil

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