Title: How to prioritise usability problems
Context: Problematic problems can be problematic to solve. Probably.
Synopsis: Good luck trying to make something without any usability issues. It’s probably not even possible. So we shouldn’t be so concerned with the existence of usability problems. What we should be concerned with is the way in which we identify and address said problems. As user experience professionals, we have (or should have) the ability to size up the user impact of a usability issue pretty quickly, but that’s not really good enough. We need to be able to quantify these impacts to our users and then effectively triage these issues to raise the overall UE quotient of the things we make. Perhaps it’s as simple as running each and every identified issue through the same identifying process which should then give us the ability to rank these accordingly and relatively. It’s not the problem itself that’s the problem, it’s how you deal with the problem that’s the problem. To be fair, my logic may also be a problem. Sorry about that.
Best Bit: “If you currently prioritise usability problems using ‘gut feel’ or intuition, you run the risk of being exposed as a fraud by a developer or manager who asks you to justify your priority ranking.”
via userfocus.co.uk
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