Usability In The Rainforest

On the web, usability refers to the ability of users to find and use stuff on a website. (How's that for a circular definition?) According to Mel Pedley on Accessites.com, there are five core components of usability:

1. Learnability: On a first visit, can users find what they're looking for?
   
2. Effectivity: Can users do stuff quickly?
   
3. Memorability: If it's been a while since a user was on the site, can s/he still use the site?
   
4. Reliability: How error-prone are users while using the site?
   
5. Enjoyability: Do users like using the site (or, at least, do they not hate it with the burning passion of a thousand suns)?
   

Let's explore these concepts with a site we're all familiar with: Amazon.com. Sarah has been living in a rural area with ridiculously slow dial-up for the past several years, and has just discovered that you can buy products online. She needs to order a new DVD burner so she can mail her mom some home movies. She types "buy stuff online" into Google.

She sees that Amazon is the first result, and decides to click on it. (Hey, bonus points for findability!) She is then dumped onto Amazon's main page.

Okay, not a problem. Amazon's apparently a big site, which makes sense since her search query was very general. She looks around for "DVD Burners", or "Computer Components", or anything that looks like it could be what she's after. There's "Computers & Office" in the sidebar, and voila! There's "Computer Components" right there.

Lots of computer components to choose from. She remembers now why she asked her nephew for help the last time she needed to buy computer parts. Where are the DVD burners?

She scrolls down and – oh, there they are! Her nephew told her once that optical drives are the same as CD/DVD drives, so she clicks there.

She's still looking in the upper-left corner when the next page loads, so she immediately sees the link for "DVD Burners" in the navigation and clicks on it, too. No use in seeing all that other stuff she's not after.

Now that Sarah has found the DVD burners, let's evaluate how Amazon has been doing so far.

• Sarah could find what she was after with relative ease, so they get a point for learnability. (On the other hand, if she had been looking for something more obscure, she probably would have had a harder time of it.)
• She didn't have to waste a lot of time to get to where she was going, but she had the benefit of already knowing that "optical drives" and "DVD burners" were synonymous. Therefore, Amazon's effectivity was mediocre.
• This is a first-time visit, so we're not analyzing memorability.
• Sarah could easily have missed the link she needed to click on a few different times, because it was not necessarily put in a place that made the most sense. Reliability may or may not be an issue.
• So far, Sarah doesn't have a problem with using the site, so its initial enjoyability is not an issue.

What could Amazon do better? This is a hard question. One's first inclination might be to say that they should make it easier to find what people are looking for. The problem with that in this case is that because Amazon carries so many products, if they tried to make it easy to find everything, that would make their site too complex and cluttered to find anything. Burying some things three or four levels deep may be the best way to organize the information. Sometimes you have to make compromises to create the best site possible.