How usable is your innovation and why you should care?

Think about this.

• Apple was NOT the founder of the MP3 format or the first to introduce it but they definitely captured the imagination of the people with iPod and made it a huge success.


• Google was neither the first to introduce internet search but definitely should be credited to making it hugely popular.


• Microsoft was definitely NOT the first to think in terms of a graphical user interface for computers but should be definitely credited with making it hugely popular.

Wonder where I am going with this? What is common between all the three scenarios identified above? The main one, I believe, is that all the 3 companies were able to innovate on the user experience and use that to establish themselves as market leaders.

We normally associate innovation with cutting edge technology which changes the way we live or work. While that is true once in a while, innovation, simply, is a new way of looking at things and redefining existing landscape or assumptions.

Of course, we can argue that usability is not the only difference in the above 3 examples and there are lots of other supporting infrastructure which helped and also about market timing, marketing, product positioning etc. While all that is true, without usability, I don’t think, they would have achieved the scale and popularity.

So it begs the question – Why did others not think about it before? Why do we generally ignore usability when we launch something innovative or new?

There are many reasons but here are my main ones that come to the top of my mind:

• First to market advantage: Companies are under constant pressure to be the first to release some cutting edge innovation. Due to this pressure, they sacrifice or compromise on the user experience in their race to launch first. As you can see from the above and countless other examples, this could prove fatal.


• Geeky Product Managers: The main focus of the technical product staff is on showing off the technical advance or new features that they sometimes ignore the user experience. Again a faulty or risky strategy.


• Eco-system or supporting infrastructure: Another aspect which gets ignored is the supporting eco-system for the user to make it complete. All the applications made available for Windows played a huge role in making it successful. Similarly iTunes played an important role in the success of Apple and iPod.

So what are the lessons to be learnt and how can we improve this for all our future innovations. These are my thoughts:

1. Ensure that your product team has a mix of both technical and non-technical resources working together. The non-technical resource should be from the user community who will ensure that the usability issues are not ignored. I think it is best to involve them from the beginning to ensure that the final design is acceptable from a user point of view.


2. Get the product team to spend some time actually watching how their product is being used by their end users and the challenges the users face. This will help them plan the future direction of the product.


3. Plan for end to end testing. This not only includes the experience related to buying your product but also should look at other related factors like supporting environment, applications or any other factors involved in improving the complete user experience of owning the product.

In summary, usability, as a field, has got some attention these days as far as web site design goes. But it still has a long way to go before it is considered even for technical gadgets or hardware/electrical appliances or software products. This is not right and frankly all our innovations (whether it is a new music player or complicated software for scheduling or it is a new invention in the area of medicine) should focus on making it usable and enhance the user experience to achieve its full potential.

So the next time when you plan the budgets for your R&D projects and the “Go to market” strategy is being planned for your next killer innovative product, make sure that appropriate attention is paid to the usability side of things.

Make your innovation usable. The world deserves it and you stand to gain as well!!!!