Useful, usable, buildable

After User Experience Designing a service for Directgov for a duration of almost a year, I have had the opportunity to work on world’s largest Central Government portal.

This huge web asset poses many different challenges for User Experience Designers as well as potential 62 million users (citizens of United Kingdom).

However, one of the main messages put forward by Andrew Lamb, User Experience Designer responsible for new service design at Directgov, is a wise and highly sensible paradigm which simply reads: ‘useful, usable, buildable’.

This is the main guiding principle behind ensuring that Directgov services are of high quality and relevance for its end users.

It’s a principle and a guideline which ought to be adopted by anyone wanting to create web services that offer high value to users.

Useful

There is no point in building a service which is not going to be useful for anyone.

To ensure that a service is useful, one first needs to understand whether a given service proposition is going to offer any value to the end users.

This understanding is usually gained through formal research activities which need to identify target users for the proposed service and find out from those target users whether they would find the proposed service useful.

Research activities need to identify personas which users fall into and work out what the needs and characteristics of each persona are.

If research findings show that target users would not find the service useful, there is no point in even starting any work on the proposed service, as building it would simply prove the research findings and therefore be a wasted effort.

Usable

If a service has been found out to be useful for target users, the next challenge is to ensure that it is usable.

This is often a complicated task as usability means that relevant business offerings need to be presented in a usable manner for target audience.

As User Experience Designers for most part we simply do not know what our users will find usable, so the only way to develop that knowledge is through iterative user testing with some potential users.

This is especially the case with Government services, where online offerings often do not fall into common online provision types, such as e-commerce for example.

Usability testing sessions help us understand the real cognitive barriers which users face when using our proposed User Interface conceptual designs.

Buildable

Once we have created a solution which has tested well with end users, we are able to ensure this solution can actually be built, taking into consideration the constraints within the back end systems.

This is the area where, within large systems, matters can become really complicated.

Back end constraints often impact User Interface in some radical manners, causing deterioration of the overall user experience and leading towards an unimplementable usable solution, or an implementable unusable solution.

Working closely with technical analysts and developers would usually ensure that the proposed solution design is implementable, but the key objective is to make sure that users’ needs are taken into account as a priority and minimise the potential negative impact of back end limitations upon user experience.

Another common challenge in this area is that a feature is buildable but not to the available budget, so it needs to be re-thought in order to be scaled down to fit that budget.

Since buildability is one of the major factors impacting on viability of any online service, it is important to take it into account early on, to avoid disappointment, wasted effort and unnecessary compromise.

This factor is also one reason why Agile approach was introduced to the world and why companies such as Google usually do very well with their services, ensuring that User Experience Design is closely coupled with continuous, iterative implementation of each service and continuous improvement to all aspects of it.

References

Directgov – Public services all in one place

Written by Jason Grant, BSc, MSc on 15th March 2010

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