Usability is not just an issue… it’s THE issue!
Last weekend my wife went grocery shopping. She bought all the usual things - all the brands that we always buy. We’ve been doing dishes by hand for a while since our dishwasher thinks it should take 4-6 hours to wash a normal load of dishes. We don’t agree with the dishwasher’s opinion (and didn’t want to buy another dishwasher right now), so it was back to washing dishes by hand.
Anyway, the brand of dishwashing detergent that we like had changed it’s packaging. Instead of the easy to hold hourglass type shape, now it was a pudgy bottle - like the Pillsbury dough boy. And wide - my wife can’t hold it comfortably. Not only that, they had added a little plastic cover over the pour spout that you had to flip back to get the liquid out. Both of these were major changes in the shape and use of the product, and became major issues. You could not easily grasp the new bottle shape, and when you did, the little plastic cap (attached on one side) was perfectly positioned to catch most of the liquid in it instead of squirting it into the sink! Just using it made a “liquid mess.” We hated using it.
This was not produced by a guy named Joe in his garage. Why didn’t the company see what was happening? From the size and awkwardness of the bottle, it’s obvious they didn’t test it with anyone - somebody just made a decision to go ahead and change it.
Who the heck thought this was better??? And has he been fired yet???
(BTW - Our solution to the “dishwashing dilemma” was to spend a day trying all the variables on our dishwasher to find a setting we could live with. We did - we found a “water miser” setting that works well and only takes an hour for the cycle. No more hand washing! Yay! Why didn’t we do this to begin with? Well, to be perfectly honest, it never occurred to me…maybe my MS was kicking up that day…)
So, how does this tie-in to ebooks? It doesn’t - directly. It does, though, in the sense of “usability.” For example - let’s say that you have forms in your ebook for the reader to fill out. You’d better think about how to handle them! If it’s a PDF file, once the “locks” are put on to prevent people from doing a “copy and paste” of your ebook’s guts, no one can fill out anything. Maybe the solution is to include a separate, small pdf of the forms that are set up for printing. Maybe you could allow annotating. There are a number of solutions. the point is - handle it, otherwise it limits your reader’s ability to use your ebook effectively.
Ask yourself - how is this going to work for my reader? Then get creative and find a way to solve the problem…
Now, there is one additional aspect of usability that I want to talk about, but I want it to have it’s own emphasis, so that will be the next post…
