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What exactly do we mean when we talk about a product or service’s “usability”? Clearly, it has something to do with how usable it is. (So far, that’s a pretty recursive definition!). But what makes something usable? At the highest level, product and user experience (UX) designers determine usability based on three factors:

• Effectiveness: Can people do what they set out to do?
• Efficiency: Can people do what they need to do within a reasonable amount of time/effort to make it worth doing?
• Satisfaction: Do people feel OK about what they had to do in order to properly use it?

This is a big deal, and there’s even a specific standard (ISO 9241-11) set forth by the International Organization for Standardization that defines usability as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”

Therefore, usability is about matching products, systems, and services to users’ needs and requirements.

When we, as members of a project team, focus on usability (and we should always focus on usability), we’re concerned with supporting people in accomplishing their tasks. This shouldn’t be confused with “functionality,” however, as the mere presence of good features and functions has little bearing on whether people are able to use them.

When we overload products or services with too many features, or when we provide them in ways that don’t match people’s expectations or needs, it’s difficult for people to access what’s needed when they need it, let alone use it once they do find it. When that happens, people end up fumbling with the product or service rather than achieving their goals. They are very likely to abandon what they’re doing, or find another way to achieve that goal.

Think of it this way: People don’t use ATMs for the sake of interacting with a machine on a wall. They use them (predominantly) because they want some cash. To design an ATM — or any product — that’s as usable as possible, we need to consider a number of factors:

• Who are the users? They’re people who are not going to be “trained” in using an ATM. They don’t need to have special knowledge of financial systems. They may not speak the local language.
• What are their goals? We can assume that it’s mostly about getting money, so we need to optimize our design for that. However, users may want to make a deposit, check their balance, or perhaps other things. Therefore, the process must be flexible.
• What is the context? ATMs are typically out in the open. Particularly in busy thoroughfares, there is often a queue to use them. Privacy is important for people in order for them to feel that it’s secure. There may be glare on the screen during the day, or not enough light in the evening.

These considerations are just scratching the surface, but start to shed light on what this might mean for the solution.

According to usability thought leader Jakob Nielsen, one of the “founding fathers” of usability, usable systems have five high-level qualities. These guide our thinking as we design, and become our frame of reference as we evaluate. Learn these key qualities and ask yourself the following questions to evaluate whether you’re on the right track to usability.

Learnability is making sure that people can begin to perform (at least) basic tasks with little effort. It’s critical to the initial use of a product or service.

• What is the user’s required knowledge level coming into the site, app, product, or service?
• What information have they been primed with?
• Are there too many features?
• Have conventions been used from other sites, apps, or systems that your audience is familiar with?
• Did you provide a way to learn about the less obvious, secondary features?

Efficiency is about ensuring that people can achieve their goals quickly with the system — after they learn how to use it.

• Does the system reduce hesitation with clear language and feedback?
• Are there special shortcuts for power users?
• Is technology leveraged to reduce user effort?
• Least importantly, how many clicks (in a digital interface) does it take to use?

Memorability means ensuring that people can not only learn to use the system initially, but that they don’t have to relearn it with every use.

• Does the system call out changes since the user’s last interaction?
• Are the interface elements placed in conventional positions?
• Would users be able to re-establish proficiency after not using it for a while?

Error management is critical to reducing the number, magnitude, and impact of any user errors.

• Have the designers anticipated errors that users may make and try to prevent them?
• Have designers  considered pre-emptive error management?
• Is the system forgiving of users’ mistakes?
• Are any error messages clear?

Satisfaction determines whether people continue to use the product/service.

• Does the product/service do what it says it will do?
• Is it different from others in its category?
• Is it visually appealing?
• Is it well executed from a technical perspective?
• Are there pleasant surprises? Does it delight?

The usability of your phone, or that ATM, depends just as much on the design of the hardware as the software. Usability is also critical to products with no digital interface at all, such as in the design of OXO kitchen utensils, where the company prides itself on giving people an easy and ergonomically sound way to open jars, peel fruit and veggies, and so on.

Conversely, think about how difficult some microwaves are to use, and because they’re all different, it’s difficult to go from using one to another. Finally, consider services, rather than physical or digital products. For instance, is the process for renewing your driver’s license a usable one? Think about the opportunities there.

We’ve all experienced products and services that are technically “usable,” in that we can easily use it. However, we scratch our head and ask ourselves, “Why?” Usability is just one — albeit a very important — piece of the puzzle.

Peter Morville, the founding father of information architecture, got designers thinking more broadly when he published his now-famous “user experience honeycomb” diagram. The honeycomb serves as a reminder that, in addition to being usable, a product or service must be findable, accessible, useful, desirable, credible, and valuable. The diagram emphasizes the interrelationship among these attributes, as well as the fact that each is a lens into the success of the solution and can be individually evaluated and prioritized. Understanding all of this is where UX design comes into play.

Usability is at the core of everything UX design students learn at General Assembly, be it in our career-changing User Experience Design Immersive program, part-time on-campus or online courses, or design-focused short-form workshops and events. It’s baked into students’ work in researching users’ needs and goals, learning synthesis techniques to develop insights, and translating those insights into hypotheses and requirements.

Usability is reinforced both in students’ theory projects and work with real-world clients, in which they create early conceptual designs and wireframes, test them with users, iterate on the solution based on their learnings, and evolve the designs into final solutions. It’s at the heart of ensuring they understand the real problem before launching into the solution.

This kind of focus allows students to recognize the simple beauty in what Breville, the small-home-appliance company, did when it introduced a function on its toasters to brown bread just “a bit more.” That’s very much aligned with a person’s goal of getting that perfect breakfast. That’s what usability is all about.

Susan Wolfe, who teaches GA’s User Experience Design Immersive in San Francisco and Sydney, has practiced UX design, run consultancies, mentored project teams, and introduced UX design practices and cultures into organizations around the globe. She has established and managed in-house UX teams within software, hardware, and services companies in the Silicon Valley. In her work, she takes a holistic service design perspective and applies the most appropriate user-centered design thinking techniques to identify issues and ultimately create the optimal experience.

After synthesizing user research and thoroughly uncovering problems to solve, user experience (UX) designers begin their design process by ideating on a number of solutions. This is where the creative magic happens! Designers sketch to explore many workable solutions to user problems, then narrow them down to the strongest concept. Using that concept, the next step is creating a usable prototype that can be tested for viability against both the users’ goals and business needs.

UX designers create prototypes — early models of a product built to test a concept and learn from it — to communicate and test designs for user interfaces of websites and applications. Prototypes communicate much more than static designs. They allow designers to demonstrate an interface’s functionality, flow, interaction, animations, and overall usability.

There are several digital tools available for today’s UX designers, each with different capabilities and outputs. With new options being released and older mainstays evolving on a regular basis, however, it can be overwhelming to choose the right one.

There are many factors to consider when deciding on a prototyping tool. Among the most important are:

• Learnability: Not all platforms are seamless to use. How easy will it be to learn?
• Cost: How much are you willing to invest in a new, unfamiliar tool? Costs can range from free to several hundred dollars per year.
• File type and outputs: How will you export and/or demo your prototype to accommodate your current workflow?
• Project goal: What is your end goal for the project? Are you presenting high-fidelity compositions to a client? Preparing annotated, workable prototypes to hand off to a development team? Demonstrating animated interaction design concepts for your internal design review? Conducting usability tests with users? Different platforms have different strengths.

Across General Assembly’s global campuses, we use a variety of prototyping tools in our UX courses, some chosen by instructors and some by students. Product Management students also leverage these tools when they learn to bring their wireframes and storyboards to life.

Here are several prototyping platforms our community has explored and found to be popular in the field to help you choose the one that’s best for your designs.

The design toolkit Sketch has become one of the more popular UI design tools, beating out industry mainstays like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator within many organizations. UX designers use Sketch to create anything from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity visual interfaces. However, Sketch lacks the ability to simulate interactions such as clicks, hovering, tapping, etc., without a third-party integration, so designers looking to make their designs interactive rely on tools like InVision, a pure prototyping solution.

InVision doesn’t have drawing or type tools for creating designs — it simply sets up interactions, connects corresponding pages, and adds animated transitions to your designs. Together, InVision and Sketch let UX designers to design and build usable prototypes for testing and generating feedback. That said, InVision’s studio design app, InVision Studio, allows users to create their designs directly in the platform, which may eliminate the need for Sketch altogether.

Axure, released in 2003, has risen to popularity along with the steady demand for UX professionals. Designers looking for advanced interaction capabilities — such as custom animations and JavaScript interactions — can rely on Axure as their sole prototyping tool. One of its most discussed weaknesses, however, is that it doesn’t output vectors but rather converts images to bitmaps, which can lead to blurring or pixelation during resizing. Axure is also seen as more complex in general, translating to larger time investments needed to learn the tool.

The drag-and-drop interface on Figma, a collaborative UI design tool, is what makes it a standout for new UX designers, particularly those who are unfamiliar with HTML and CSS. It includes high-fidelity drawing tools so you can craft designs that are as close to the final product as possible. Other useful features include automatic responsive designs, so all artboards adapt to the screen size, layout grids for designing orderly compositions, and reusable components that allow the user to keep design patterns consistent throughout their project.

Adobe XD is a product created exclusively so that designers can build their prototypes in one place. The software has a handy “play” button to demo your prototype at any time. And, while it doesn’t have as many design tools as Sketch, the team at Adobe continues to add new features to XD, such as underline text, view hotspot hints, and the ability to see the prototype in full-screen mode.

Webflow was founded in 2013 as part of Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. Created as tool for designers to craft fully functional, custom websites, Webflow works well for prototyping interactive designs. Additionally, its user interface is intuitive enough for designers who know minimal HTML and CSS. The Webflow interface provides designers with more robust layout and styling options than other CMS options such as Squarespace or Wix, which are less viable for prototyping because of limited template customization.

Having all of these prototyping tools at our disposal is great news for UX designers, and at the end of the day, these are all designed to push us forward in our design process. If you find yourself getting stuck in deciding which tool is best, it’s important to go back to the end goal of your efforts and keep them in mind. You can also take comfort in knowing that tools are constantly changing — it’s exciting to watch how they all evolve.

Jared Rogers is a User Experience Design Immersive instructor at GA’s Austin campus. His extensive UX career centers on education, tech, and media industries, with both agency and in-house design experience. Some of his notable clients include IBM, AT&T, Stanford University, and the Meredith Corporation.

Usability testing is like an acid test of a design. It allows you to get feedback on the design from intended users in a relatively cost-effective and easy way. It’s a great way to learn what is and isn’t working, and identify opportunities for improvement. Designers can test a design at any time in its lifecycle, and with a relatively small number of users, accessing diverse sets of users that may be locally situated or even across the globe.

Usability testing is an integral part of user experience (UX) design that allows us to get feedback directly from users, thereby making a product that’s not only functional and user-friendly, but also provides value. It’s often done at the beginning of a design project, with an intention to check the design structure’s efficiency, the organization of content, and whether the design direction is in line with the users’ “mental model,” motivations, and satisfaction. When incorporated towards the end of the design process, usability testing helps validate and evaluate whether the product’s design goals are met.

Usability testing provides an opportunity to observe users while they interact with a design, and hence learn and understand not only the problems that occur but, more importantly, why they’re happening. For example, if a user is unable to complete a task in a mobile app, is it because some link labels don’t make sense? Or perhaps the content itself is confusing, or the whole task flow doesn’t meet their expectation. Testing also allows us to empathize with users by learning about how they think. This provides valuable insights and data that allow for effective and efficient design decisions — which also means fewer arguments about the design within the team and the stakeholders!

One of usability testing’s obvious benefits is that it leads to more user-friendly design, but there are other amazing reasons to implement the practice. Usability testing can lead to great results when it comes to comparing design alternatives, checking to see whether design goals are met, getting stakeholder buy-in, and more. The typical steps involved in conducting a usability test are:

• Planning
• Recruiting
• Conducting the test
• Analyzing the results
• Debriefing and reporting

Depending on the design being tested, its objective, and its resource constraints, usability testing can be done through various approaches, including:

• In-person moderated
• Remote moderated
• Remote unmoderated
• Guerilla testing

In my mind, two of the key challenges in conducting a successful usability test are recruiting the right participants and having a skilled moderator. A good moderator must be empathetic, open-minded, and a good listener, and must have the ability to multitask!

I once worked on a redesign of a website that sells and provides information on secondhand cars. As part of the project, my team did a usability test on the existing website to understand the problems users were facing. This website was designed for lead generation, promotion, retention, and advertisements by users who wanted to sell their cars or buy a secondhand car. When I reported the first day’s findings to the client’s team, they were shocked by some of the feedback.

The next day, the company’s CEO observed the sessions in person, and he was so overwhelmed by what he observed that he made it mandatory for the test session highlight videos to be put on every developer’s desktop. That way, when the developers logged into their systems every morning, the first thing they would see would be the users’ struggles. This was an excellent technique to allow the team to build empathy with the users and design with them at front of mind.

Another project I worked on that showcases the value of usability testing was a multi-country project for a technology hardware company. The original website was designed for the U.S. market, then adapted for China, Germany, and Russia. We needed to conduct a usability test on each of the four countries’ websites to understand if the expansion strategy was successful. Using the moderated remote usability testing methodology, we conducted tests in all four countries in a fairly short period of time, with no travel involved. We not only received great feedback on the websites, but also learned amazing insights into how the cultural differences affected the way the website was perceived in each country.

At GA, usability testing is covered extensively in our User Experience Design Immersive (UXDI) program, and on a basic level in our part-time User Experience Design course, on campus and online. Students learn the detailed methodology and relevant tools, and have ample opportunity to practice it in class as well as in projects.

In class, students learn usability testing methods through practical exercises; in UXDI, for example, they do this by roleplaying as the moderator (test conductor), the participant (user), and the note-taker. Then they practice testing as part of virtually all their projects, including with real-world clients. By the end of the course, students are able to immediately apply their usability testing skills to new projects.

Shebani Saxena has been practicing user experience design since 2004, when she began working with Human Factors International, the world’s largest UX company. After nearly six years there, she has worked as a freelance UX consultant for companies like The Pizza Company, Done by None, and Sun Life Financial. Shebani has a strong desire to keep learning and share her knowledge with others. She currently teaches the full-time User Experience Design Immersive course at GA Hong Kong.

A service, unlike a product, is intangible — you can’t hold it or touch it. Rather, it’s a series of intertwined, specifically orchestrated activities. Services unfold over time across steps and channels. Also unlike a product, both the production and consumption of a service happen simultaneously. The service is the interplay between the customer and service provider.

Service design is a practice that contributes to delivering a great user experience. In fact, the quality of the service is frequently what makes or breaks a person’s experience with an organization. Whether service design is being used to improve existing services or create new ones, it takes into account the needs of both the customer and the service provider.

Service design is a big deal because we engage with services much more than we engage with specific products. We take public transportation, go out to lunch, manage our money, go to concerts, get medical help, pay our taxes, register our cars, and so forth. Certainly, there are tangible products and tools that we — and service providers — use in the process, but that’s only part of it. From the service design perspective, it’s that overall exchange we care about — and that exchange needs to work for all parties. We certainly notice when it doesn’t, and we, as customers, simply look elsewhere the minute it fails.

The more complex and interconnected our world gets, the more opportunities there are for service failure — making good service design more critical than ever. Service quality often suffers due to the complexity of linking systems together in a way that makes sense to both customers and service providers. Service designers must come to the rescue, and many designers who previously focused on designing digital interfaces are now turning their attention to services.

Service design is becoming a high-profile skill in industries such as financial services, health care, social services, and beyond, popping up in ads for product design and user experience roles. However, it’s nothing particularly new. When talking about UX design, many people’s first inclination is to think about digital products. But UX design is as much about physical products and services as it is about digital services. It’s also about ensuring that an organization has the processes and skills in place to deliver on the promise.

Although they ultimately have a slightly different focus, at the highest level, the philosophy of service design and UX design is the same:

• It’s holistic. It involves considering all channels and players involved, and understanding what happens before, during, and after any interactions.
• It’s user-centered. It puts the experience of all of the people involved at the heart of every decision made.
• It embodies design thinking. It uses the designers’ approach and methods to balance people’s needs (desirability) with what’s doable (feasibility) and what’s appropriate for the business (viability).
• It’s increasingly the differentiator between companies. As a product or service becomes a commodity and the barriers for consumers moving between providers are lowered (think financial services or telecommunications), it’s the quality of the service and experience that determines whether people embrace your offering.

In a feature-rich, constantly-on world, thoughtful service design gives organizations a unique opportunity to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Businesses are now innovating and redefining themselves based on their service in several key ways:

• Improving routine services, like renewing a driver’s license or getting a cell phone plan. In the case of a driver’s license (where there’s no competition), delivering better service is good for everyone. In the case of a telecommunications provider, it can be the difference between retaining or losing a customer.
• Totally overhauling an experience, such as Disney’s introduction of its MagicBand to park visitors. The MagicBand wrist band facilitates payment, placing orders, making restaurant reservations, entering your hotel, finding the rest of your party, and even delivering greetings from Disney characters who know you by name. The technology is one thing — but it’s the people and processes that make this all happen.
• Revolutionizing an industry, like the way Airbnb and Uber reimagined accommodation and ride services by upending who provides the services, how they are acquired, and the interchange between providers and customers.
• Going from product to service, like how Square provides small-business loans to customers using its point-of-sale solution, or the aircraft jet engine manufacturer Rolls Royce offers support services based on the fact that it’s already collecting usage data.

Service design requires big-picture thinking. This means not merely focusing on designing the particular products and tools used in the interchange between customers and service providers, but also understanding and optimizing how everything and everyone fits together — who does what, when and how they do it — to achieve a desired result. As service designers, we talk about the “line of visibility,” and study both the “onstage” activities (what the customer sees and hears) and the “backstage” activities (services, processes, and tools used behind the scenes), and we choreograph the interplay.

As illustrated in the figure below, when designing (or redesigning) a service, we take a top-down approach, starting by focusing on the desired experience, and from there considering the interactions, touchpoints, and procedures needed to create it. Armed with this knowledge, we are able to determine the best products and tools to use, and we design these to optimize the overall experience.

To be successful, we must:

• Have a clear understanding of the reason and demand for the service, and the ability of the provider to deliver.
• Focus the design on customers’ needs, ensuring that the service will be valuable and efficient.
• Treat “unusual” circumstances and typical situations as equally important in thinking out the requirements to accommodate them, as that’s when service often breaks down.
• Design with input from users of the service, and collaboration with all relevant stakeholders providing the service.
• Prototype the service before developing it in full.
• Start with a minimum viable service (MVS), and use an iterative design process based on feedback and analysis to refine and add to the service.

User experience design students at General Assembly learn to think holistically. UX is not merely user interface (UI) design; it’s about the before, during, and after use. UX design involves applying user-centered design techniques like research and low-fidelity prototyping to ensure that you’re solving the right problem before polishing the solution. When you learn about UX design at GA, whether it’s through our full-time Immersive program, part-time course on campus or online, or a short-form workshop or bootcamp, you learn to think about the overarching ecosystem you are designing for. Students train to recognize that people’s experiences are formed over time, based on interactions across individual and broad touchpoints. They also learn how our roadmaps allow us to focus in on figuring out how to get there from here.

Susan Wolfe, who teaches GA’s User Experience Design Immersive in San Francisco and Sydney, has practiced UX design, run consultancies, mentored project teams, and introduced UX design practices and cultures into organizations around the globe. She has established and managed in-house UX teams within software, hardware, and services companies in the Silicon Valley. In her work, she takes a holistic service design perspective and applies the most appropriate user-centered design thinking techniques to identify issues and ultimately create the optimal experience.

Every great design begins with great research. By using techniques like user interviews, contextual inquiry, and competitive analysis, user experience (UX) designers have the opportunity to learn about user pain points, motivations, and preferences in a very personal way. But tracking all of that data and finding patterns can be difficult, especially when trying to navigate a long text document or pages of handwritten notes. That’s why UX designers practice affinity mapping.

An affinity map, also known as an affinity diagram, gives designers a complete picture of their early research process. It is a physical, tactile, and editable design artifact that’s invaluable for showcasing trends, themes, and areas of opportunity for discovery and improvement. With just a few tools, you can create a visual representation of large amounts of data that will help to inform your future strategy.

Creating an affinity map is easy. All you’ll need is some paper to write ideas, writing tools, and a surface to mix, match, and move your notes around. A few tools that will help you build these maps are:

• Sticky notes: If you Googled “affinity map” right now, you’d find photos upon photos of sticky notes with designers clustered around them. These are the crux of your map. They’re the right size to write down bite-size pieces of research, and they’re easy to move around and group together to show research themes and related findings. You’ll go through more of these than you think, so stock up! Minis will be too compact to write on, so go for the standard size or slightly larger.
• Markers: Pen and pencil can be too light to read, especially if you’re building a map with a team. Markers help make sure everyone can read all of the ideas — whether they’re right next to the map or a few feet away.
• A large, flat, writing surface: You’ll need a large enough area to post a bunch of different sticky-note thoughts, but also add additional observations that provide context to your research. These could be themes you see emerging, questions you want to follow up on in additional research, or brainstorming ideas. Large dry-erase boards can work, but most designers I know prefer to stick up large-scale Post-its on the wall.

Your initial research can come from a lot of places: in-person interviews, observations you see of users interacting with a current product or service, internet searches, and surveys. All of this user data now needs a place to go. Enter the affinity map! Being able to separate data out into moveable blocks (like sticky notes) will allow you to get a better scope of the qualitative and quantitative data you’ve collected. The first step is to write out all your research findings on your trusty sticky notes. You can group together like information later, but for now you just need to get it out of your head or your notebook and into this new working space.

Things to jot down may include:

• Statistics and other key facts: These could be from your own data collection, surveys, or secondary research. Chances are some of these numbers and research-backed facts will help to reinforce some of the more subjective observations you’ve collected from in-person interviews.
• Personal observations or insights: What has jumped out at you as you’ve navigated your research? These “aha” moments could be the beginning of some deeper insights and point the way to future exploration. Add them in now and thank yourself later.
• User quotes: User interviews give you tons of information — hooray! But the pieces of interviews that can actually be used to inform your future design are buried in bits and bobs of small talk, tangential stories, and relevant, but not crucial facts or observations. Don’t give up! Read through your notes as though you’re reading an essay or novel. If a sentence jumps out at you, that’s a green light to jot it down.

Now that you have a small mountain of sticky notes posted around you, get to grouping! Group user quotes that highlight similar issues or opportunities together. Statistics that all fall in the same area of research should go to together, too. As your groups start to solidify, annotate with a marker on your paper or whiteboard to begin to put notes in broader categories.

A few tips to help your organize your groups and categories:

• Your first categories are probably not going to be your final categories. Don’t be afraid to move sticky notes around to areas where it doesn’t look like they belong; you may find a relationship between two disparate user issues that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
• Take photos. Paper gets crumpled, and sometimes sticky notes flutter to the floor and are stepped on by an unsuspecting coworker. Document your process so that if you do have to put it back together at one point, you won’t be starting from Square One.
• Ask for input. Once you feel good about the organization of your map, have another person (either from your team or someone else) take a look. Are they finding the same patterns you did? If they’re not, it might be an indicator that you’ve narrowed your research down too much. Always start broad before you focus too intently on one area. The design process is iterative, and your affinity map may be, as well.

At GA, we encourage learning by doing. In our part- and full-time UX design courses, we introduce affinity mapping as a way to organize and synthesize initial research from user interviews. Students then use affinity mapping techniques to find patterns and key observations to guide the rest of their process.

As the course continues and research gets deeper, affinity maps become even more important as a way to keep track of data. By establishing the practice early on, students have a solid foundation in this skill and can move confidently forward. Happy mapping!

Rachel Wendte is a designer, content strategist, and marketer who teaches the User Experience Design Immersive course at GA’s Chicago campus. She is passionate about communicating design for connection, and uses her skills in client management, user research, and strategic thinking to craft meaningful solutions that are user-friendly and aligned with client goals. Before learning UX, she worked as an arts administrator and social media consultant.