Everyone knows of Apple, Inc's famous Macintosh, iPods and iPhone as boutique consumer electronics items; if you're one of the Apple cognoscenti, you buy them, and if you think of them as overpriced items, you probably mock them.
If you're doing product engineering or web site development, there's a lot you can learn from them.
Apple products go through one of the most rigorous product usability testing regimes imaginable, and much of the current state of the art in user interface design comes from work that Apple did in the mid to late 1980s.
For any company making a new product, usability should be one of the key considerations.
Usability impacts the public acceptance of a product more so than features do, and more so than its reliability or its price to value ratio.
Consumers buy products to get the benefits of using them, and usability is critical for this.
As a case in point, while TiVo is the industry standard Digital Video Recorder, it was not the first one on the market.
Both Panasonic and Sony had DVRs on the market two years before TiVo did.
TiVo won the battle for making the product associated with their brand because they made theirs easier to use, and tied it to a subscription service that would track program listings from cable and satellite TV companies to record things it thought you might enjoy.
TiVo won because its engineers thought about the customer experience rather than the technology.
In a nutshell, usability testing is making sure that your product is usable by people other than the engineers who designed them.
Apple did the same with the MP3 player market, not because the iPod is a better MP3 player; the MP3 playback mechanism is commodity silicon that costs pennies, and is shoved into thumb drives and wrist watches at this point.
Apple's integration of the iPod and the iTunes music store is what made the iPod the dominant music player; Rio and Sony made MP3 players for five years before Apple got into the market; Apple made an MP3 player that allows you to buy songs by the track, and proved that people would pay for them.
Another recent win on product usability and testing is the Amazon Kindle.
Amazon isn't quite up there with TiVo and Apple on its usability, though its ability to encourage impulse spending on books on the web site (and telling customers that if they buy one more thing, they trigger free shipping) is a beautiful example of making a web site more usable.
However, Amazon learned from Apple that usability matters; the differences in usability between the first Kindle and the new one out this year are subtle...
but show a lot of effort put into refining the places where customers complained about the first iteration of the product.
The buttons for next page and previous page were moved so that they wouldn't get bumped accidentally.
The product now comes with a protective sleeve; the tactile feel of the keyboard buttons has been improved.
Which shows that usability isn't something you do at the end of the product's development cycle.
It's an ongoing process as you keep the product on the market.
Now that you have seen why it's important, we'll discuss methodologies for usability testing and ways to do it effectively and inexpensively.