Usability. To convince people of your service. Get out word of mouth.

In my previous article, Gaining users. Lessons learned from blogging., I looked into the question how to gather audience for a blog and what influences most whether people stay or leave. The conclusion I’ve taken so far is that whatever you offer, you need to win over people for whatever step you want them to do. This immediately directs to the subject of usability which, in my opinion, is key to win people over.

Usability is “the ease with which people can employ a particular tool [...] in order to achieve a particular goal.” [src] Closely related to that is “the degree to which a [...] service [...] is accessible by as many people as possible” [src] — accessibility. Information visualization — exploiting perception channels to ease recognition of information –, more generally, information architecture — clear structure, easing yourself to get oriented — and navigability — appropriate tools for navigation, e.g. a kind of landmarks, such as shared color scheme for a related bunch of pages — belong into the same field. All together belong to human:computer interaction (HCI). All these you can justify to provide your passers-by and users with best man-made user experience ever.

Usability to human:computer interaction in general was a large piece of my course of studies, paired by the analysis of how human beings grasp ideas and how they memorize them. What I learned here, I applied to my communicative skills. The core of this application you can summarize like this: Serve every piece of new info a way the user is able to comprehend immediately. Before you attempt to make clear something that needs previous knowledge, make sure your addressee in fact has that knowledge. Feed them the facts before you need to build upon later. Personally, I prefer to apply this simple pattern down to as ’simple’ things as text or individual sentences. — Note: How often did you read any text you didn’t grasp because what you needed for comprehension got introduced past the point when you really needed it?
 

So, now, what has usability to do with your web service or your community in general? Basically said, usability applied well helps to lower the hurdles for passers-by to become users of your service. Even more, usability serves the sake of convincing the user for your service — even over and over again to make them take the steps necessary, or those you want them to take to get most out of the user’s participation. Also, seen from the opposite point of view, usability helps to avoid to scare away any previously gained users. If you know which beavers to use, usability is quite simple to implement, and it’s a big chance for you to discern your service from the competition.

Let’s start with the hurdles that can keep passers-by from actually using your service and what you could do wrong by means of usability, just to make clear how facile it is to fall for them.

Possible hurdles emerge from lack in, for example, accessibility, information visualization, information architecture or navigability. Accessibility is probably one of the most underestimated hurdle service providers can trip on. A lack of accessibility may cause to re-disable originally disabled people by displaying too tiny text or too poor foreground:background contrast. Which may affect un-impaired people as well, such as anyone not of your age or state of health. Think about your parents and their decreasing visual abilities. — Note: Even web-experienced users often are unaware of that they can change the size of the fonts or how they can make poorly contrasted text readable.

Information visualization, on the other hand, is something the casual web designer may fail to set up in the first place, however, there are possible pitfalls they should know about. Information visualization is after exploting visual perception to ease to recognize as much important information at once as possible. However, it’s simple to tap into these visual perception channels inadvertently — and by that congesting them, make the user cry, wishing to be someplace else. In a word: That might make your users run away, screamingly.

I’ll present you just a few — but most-common — examples for overloading perception below. My implicit suggestion is to avoid them:

• a too jumbled up page design — compare the Yahoo! portal vs. Google’s main search page
• (too) strong contrasts and attention-attracting color schemes — e.g. black on yellow
• ongoing movements — animated ads (note: who argues that people can scroll ads out to make them invisible misses the point of ads) or
• blinking text — that’s no accident the direction indicator of cars is blinking. It’s to gather attention. For the relevant moment, not all the duration you — for example — scan the street map for a particular location.

Another hurdle may emerge from poor information architecture design. Information architecture is after giving the user a clue where the heck they are within the logical structure of a website. Therefore its aims are to create a clear structure that eases the user to learn and to know about where within that network of pages they are now and which path to take to get to any wanted location immediately and without any detour. Implicitly, obstacles that emerge from poor information architecture just point into the opposite direction: unclear structure, one-ways, back-links pointing to a not yet visited place/page. In a word: logical labyrinths.

Fortunately, content management system (CMS) suppliers grasped this and implemented their CMSes accordingly now. Therefore labyrinthical websites are gone mostly, nowadays, though site operator still often fail that benefit and mix up everything again, re-creating the mazes by heavy crosslinking or overloading their sites with add-ons which are available here and there but not everywhere one would expect them. That’s simply the effect of hand-crafted websites. — However, if you see yourself here, for a starter I suggest you to have a look into
Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, well, not only a look into it but to actually comprehend what’s described there and what they tell you. — If you prefer to stick to the web or to get more into the foundations of presentation at all, try Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen blog — which I can suggest you very much.
 

Aside of all these possible pitfalls, usability is one appropriate tool that helps very much to convince people of your service. A high usability enables people to use your service. The higher the usability of your service the easier for your users to gain something from it. That’s going to be convenient and comfortable — which in turn makes using your service rather attractive. — And, with a glance to get your service become popular, a high degree of convenience and comfort makes people tell about your service — that is: word of mouth. Praise. Makes people know about your service. And: It’s free the moment you implement usability well.