In any design process we need to think first of all the things our user will do with whatever we are designing so we can achieve our goals. If we’re designing a website, for example, we need to add certain ways in which the user can share an article or page they like. We also need to make sure that the user will find whatever he is looking for. To get to the point to decide how to design and what to put in that design we need to establish objectives and goals and then add specific features that will help us achieve those.

I see many products that are supposed to get users to increase their productivity at work and they’re hard to use and designed to make a myriad of things that could help productivity, but not designed to teach the user how to use them to increase their productivity. This happens when the designer forgets about the user and starts to concentrate in the product. If the product is awesome but the user can’t understand it then it’s useless. This is why excel is so complete, but people still look for other tools to process data and information that are easier to use. Part of the design process is to think in the novice user and how we can guide him to become better. Designers that focus on the tool always forget that the main goal is not to make the user better at the tool, but better at whatever he is doing with the tool. Going back to the Excel example, the main goal of Excel is to make us better at numbers analysis of any kind and therefore the tutorials need to teach us how to be better at that using Excel and not how to be an Excel master. In fact even the Microsoft Certifications go the way of making people Excel Masters and that’s the main reason someone that has one of those certifications forgets 75% of what they learned after a month. 

Usability also helps meet your goals of repeat users, unique readers in a month, retweets, etc. Let’s say you have a goal to make every customer that bought Awesome App. 1.0  to buy Awesome App 2.0. If awesome App 1.0 was design for usability this would be easy. Awsome App has now become a partner with the user and it helps her do her work much better and the tutorials tell her how a good awesome analysis is done. The links to the help point not just to tutorials on the tool, but to the most recent developments in methodology. The app makes the user better at the awesome analysis, not just better at using the Awesome App.

The problem lies in how the process is handled and in the organizational laziness to do the previous work to the design. Usually when a product is designed there needs to be a long term strategy for it that has to establish concrete goals as to what the user should aim to do with it, in what conditions will it be used and how do we expect the overall experience to be. In most cases the designers knowledge of the user is limited and substantial data is needed from research and insights from the people that have more contact with the customer. The Web, Marketing and Customer Service teams can be among those. All this insights should help us define a sentence that will say “I want to be a kick ass [insert what your product or service will help this person become better at]”. Then place that line where everyone can see it, because this should guide all the development and testing processes.

I started with the example of a website. To go back there, if you’re building a website for news then you need to make sure you’re clear on what you want your users to be good at. In that case i will pick: make them better informed, making better informants. This two main goals are the ones that will help us reach the heartless goals of unique visitors or any numbers there. Let’s always be sure to have the user under consideration before any numerical goal we’ve been given.