 Welcome to What is Usability? This learning activity will help you understand what usability is and how usability design is a crucial part of user experience design. User experience design focuses on a deep understanding of the user's needs, wants, and abilities. Usability, or user-centered design, is the process of designing something from the perspective of how it will eventually be used by an actual person. Simply put, usability differs from user experience because it considers a product's usefulness in addition to everything else covered by user experience design. When designing for usability, you should keep the user's psychological profile and physiology in mind. Usability projects are designed for efficiency of use, ease of learning, and general satisfaction of use. When developing your product, ask yourself the following four questions. Is my project quick and easy to learn? Is my project efficient to use? Does my project allow for rapid recovery from errors? Is my project easy to remember? If you or your users answer yes to all four questions, you're off to a good start. Start by focusing on the task first and the design second. A well-designed product is more than just a pretty face. It should be easy to navigate and informative and help your users complete a specific task. In order to meet your user's needs, you must make their task completion your primary target. When should you test for usability? You should always be testing for usability. No project is ever truly completed. Every project needs to continually evolve and improve. User behavior changes. When it does, your project needs to change too. You may be working on a project where your client has design requests that, if implemented, will render a project useless. One way to express the importance of usability designed to a client is to share its potential benefits. Increased productivity. Increased profitability. Reduced training costs. Increased satisfaction. Sharing these benefits can help to create a healthy balance between the user's needs and wants and the client's needs and wants. Usability has become so critical in design that there are even ISO standards regarding user experience design. ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, coordinates worldwide industrial and commercial standards. ISO 9241 and ISO TR 16982-2002 detail standards on human-centered usability methods that are recommended for product design and evaluation. They discuss the advantages, disadvantages and other factors relevant to using each usability method. Enough of that technical mumbo-jumbo. Here's what you need to know about usability. Are you listening? Focus on your users. Incorporate your users early on in your design process. Identify their needs and wants and incorporate those into your design. Perform usability testing with your users and make modifications based on their feedback. You won't always be able to incorporate all of the suggestions and that's okay. Just make sure you're always designing for your users. You have completed what is usability.