usability
What It Means
Usability measures how easily and effectively your intended users can actually accomplish what they need to do with your product or system. It's not just about whether something works, but whether real people can use it successfully without frustration or errors.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
Poor usability directly impacts revenue through abandoned transactions, increased support costs, lower user adoption, and competitive disadvantage. High usability drives customer satisfaction, reduces training costs, and increases productivity across your organization.
Real-World Example
An e-commerce checkout process might work perfectly from a technical standpoint, but if customers can't figure out how to apply a discount code or keep getting confused by the shipping options, they'll abandon their carts - that's a usability problem costing you sales.
Common Confusion
Many executives think usability just means 'making it look nice' or assume that if their technical team can use something easily, customers can too. Usability requires testing with actual target users in realistic scenarios, not just internal stakeholder opinions.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, usability directly impacts patient safety and clinical outcomes, as poorly designed systems can lead to m...
Finance: In finance, usability is critical for customer-facing platforms like trading systems, mobile banking apps, and investmen...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"extent to which a system product or service can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use (note 1: The “specified” users, goals and context of use refer to the particular combination of users, goals and context of use for which usability is being considered; note 2: used as a qualifier to refer to the design knowledge, competencies, activities and design attributes that contribute to usability, such as usability expertise, usability professional, usability engineering, usability method, usability evaluation, usability heuristic). [See also: ISO/IEC 9241-11 Ergonomic of Human-System Interaction — Part 11: Usability: Definitions and Concepts. ISO, Geneva, Switzerland, 2018, https://www.iso.org/standard/63500.html.]"Source: ISO/IEC_TS_5723:2022(en)
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