Usability is a lie, and what that means for our support website

Posted on August 13th, 2009 Jim Mackenzie No comments

As a clued up, savvy individual, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the hubbub that surrounds any website change, and the focus on usability.  There are reams and reams of books, articles, papers and websites that focus on this particular term (17 million results if you google the word) and it sometimes feels that you can’t discuss websites without coming back to this idea.

Let me ask you a question.  How many software products or websites do you know about that aren’t usable?  And if you do know any, how many do you actually use on a regular basis?  I’d be willing to wager that the answer is not many, or even none.

I watched a very interesting video of a talk by Ryan Singer of 37signals at FOWD New York 2008*, where amongst other things, he explains that usable isn’t a compliment.  I’d come to a similar conclusion from the feedback we get from the support calls and emails we receive; usable just isn’t an adjective we hear when customers are praising the software.

So what does this mean for the support section of our website?

As you might have read in James’ recent post about Employee ideas (and if you haven’t you can read it here), we are looking at introducing a web portal for Customer Support, allowing customers a personal area.  I suggested this idea, as currently, our support page provides some contact information, and a little form for sending an email to the support team.  It’s ok.  It’s usable.

So, we’ve been throwing round some ideas about what we can do better, and quickly came up with some words to describe the new portal.  Those words are clear, easy, fast, fun, and most importantly, good.  Usually, the first word in a list like that will be usable.  I’ll hold my hands up; we pretty much took those from Ryan too, but it’s hard to come up with better words.  If you’ve got suggestions, let me know in the comments.

So, we aren’t looking too much at usability; instead, we are using those lovely adjectives clear, easy, fast, fun and good.  We want the new portal to be all about clarity; it should be instantly obvious what you can do on the page, and easy to do it to boot.  The site should be fast, and using it should make you feel good about using it; there should be a sense of achievement in finding the answers.  Finally, we want the site to be good.  Actually, we want it to be great, and to be the best support experience possible, and that is where you come in.

We need your suggestions about what you would like to see on the portal, and what you would make use of.

Pop a comment below, or send us an email with your ideas.  To get you started, here’s some of the things we might be adding.

• A search tool, which will help you find information about submission issues, features, and guides on how to use the software.
• Clear, informative guides that take you step by step through specific features, for new users, and old pros alike.
• Training videos, to help with getting started, or to demonstrate tips and tricks for using the software better.
• Information about the latest updates, and scheduled releases.
• A place for customers to log in, and check the status of outstanding queries, or to send new questions to the support team, and to make suggestions.
• A forum, where our users can build a community of shared expertise with our software, and to give us the best feedback possible.

The big question we want to ask is this: What would make your life easier?

I’d love to hear your answers.

*You can watch Ryan here if you have 40 minutes to spend, and you are interested in design concepts.

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