Usability or Usefulness: the forgotten side of user experience.

Benjamin W.

December 4, 2009

Usable: capable of being used.

Useful: being of use or service; serving some purpose; advantageous, helpful, or of good effect.

Kathy Sierra is awesome. I didn’t know much about here until she was interviewed on the web 2.0 show. It’s amazing that you can design websites for a while and still not be fully aware of the people that matter on the web. Anyhoo…

Since that interview I’ve been completely stuck with the idea of making people kick-ass. Or at least asking myself how I can help people kick-ass. I’m a designer not a programmer, although I build the sites I design. But I have users too. People use my design to communicate. And if I’ve done my job, it helps them kick-ass at communicating to their audience.

This brings me to my point: Useful is way more important than usable. Usable seems so obvious to me that I don’t know why it gets so much attention. But usable implies that someone wants to use it. That they’re trying to use it. But why would they even try in the first place? They’ll try it if they think it will be useful.

The tools that exist now are unbelievable. We have it so easy with Photoshop, Coda and Final Cut that by myself, I can do what it used to take 25 people and 20 machines to do. And I can do it faster. Yet there is a relatively small amount of people who have taken the time to learn any one of them, much less all three.

Making a product simple or usable reduces the friction of getting people to use it. But it doesn’t motivate people to do so.

The value is not in usability but in usefulness. To the degree that usability makes something more useful is the degree that your user and you win. But everything, even Basecamp, has a learning curve. And people need to know why they should bother. Or better yet, how it will help them kick-ass at whatever they want to kick-ass at. I’m excited to see applications, sites, posters, video games, movies, blogs and books that really take into consideration how to help people kick-ass and remind them how much they want to.Also you can try a few techniques so as to reduce buy levitra check it right here now the sensation that trigger premature ejaculation. Studies show that over 3.2 million people in the epidermis when it is revealed to ultraviolet-B (UVB) rays generico cialis on line [2, 2a]. How cool is that? Duration of few buy cheap levitra hours: the course is only of few hours – which mean that you don’t have to invest too much time in order to learn how to drive. Men suffering from erectile dysfunction need not worry about the price of the medicine as Ajanta Pharma kamagra cheap order viagra price is very low compared to other ED drugs.

Letter Case

Graphic Design & Web Design

Letter Case was my one-man design shop based in Los Angeles, CA.
I ran it for 2 years until I joined Typekit in January 2011.

In my spare time I've been learning to program by building my first web application.
A simple tool called Talkative to help people publish their talks on the web.

My current project is The Briefcase. A blog and podcast.
It's a place for me to create and publish stuff.

If you have any comments, thoughts or questions,
feel free to contact me at: benthomaswelch [at] gmail.com.

Thanks for checking out my blog. Cheers!

Simplicity is harder than it looks.