Usability for Fun and Profit

By Mark Williamson


Name: Chris Rourke.
Age: 42.
What is your business called? User Vision.
Where is it based? Edinburgh and London.

- What services does it offer?
Usability, the science of making things easier to use. We make things like websites, software, mobiles, adverts, packaging, thermostats easy for people to use and at the same time more profitable for the businesses behind them. Often it requires identifying and removing various hurdles to online transactions that makes a real difference. For example, with a leading bank we provided advice on the content and flow of pages for selling payment protection insurance. The changes implemented have resulted in a five-fold increase in sales of the product and, of course, much greater profitability of that part of the website.

- To whom does it sell?
We sell to the UK and Europe, and our clients include the BBC, Nokia, HSBC, Auto Trader and Honeywell.

What is its turnover? £1m this year.

How many employees? Eleven and growing.

When was it formed? 2000.

- Why did you take the plunge?
It was time to spread my wings and go it alone. I had lots of experience and wanted to expand my knowledge and the innovative services I could offer - working for someone else means you're restricted by their goals to a certain extent. I wanted the freedom to create new markets for usability and explore what would take web and product development to the next commercial level and point of competitive difference.

I recognised that there was going to be a greater need for usability as more people used the web. Although usability has been important in software design, a key difference on the web is that the user (or customer) is in the driver's seat and if they find a site difficult to use they will just go to a competitor site.

With software, typically, the user is either being paid to use it (ie, they are an employee) or have already bought a software package and will work their way through the difficulties eventually. With the web it is much more immediate and companies trying to establish themselves online were coming to realise the importance of an easy-to-use interface.

I set up User Vision just at the start of the dot.com bubble bursting and one of the reasons why the high-profile Boo.com site came to a bad end was that it was highly unusable. It did not support user's decisions as they shopped and instead concentrated on fancy, bandwidth heavy graphics. It provided a bad experience, customers stayed away in droves and the company crashed.

Although all companies have websites, those with highly-usable sites will benefit from greater traffic and use of the site, especially in fields where someone can transact through different channels. For example, with banking there are branches or call centres as options, however the web is the least-expensive channel and a usable site is a strong competitive advantage. Similarly, with products and software, people naturally gravitate to the easiest to use ones and companies that invest in usability benefit from it.