Usability improved by about six percent each year over the past decade according to Jakob Nielsen’s research. That works out to a seemingly-astounding 77 percent. That sounds like incredibly good news but it’s not: Usability is improving at a much slower rate than other areas of computing. Nielsen estimates that it’ll take “74 years to reach acceptable user experience quality.”
Ouch.
We’ve known for years that usability success rates are misleading. If 70 percent of users are successful, 30 percent fail. As usability experts, we tend to forget the 30 percent failure rate and focus on the 70 percent success rate.
It takes Nielsen most of a screen to get to the really useful data: “During the last decade, we’ve collected formal usability metrics for 262 websites. In 2000, the average failure rate was 39%; in 2010, the average failure rate is 22%.” Nielsen attributes a doubling of conversion rates (one percent to two percent) to the doubling of website usability.
The big elephant in the room question remains unanswered: What’s an acceptable usability failure rate?
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.