Usability / Ease of Use are familiar themes while developing Web/Mobile products. In my experience , having worked on several web based products, every organization prioritizes, resources and thinks about this facets quite differently.
Consider a scenario, the Head of Web Analytics writes an email to the Sales Director and Managing Director mentioning that users are consuming less and less news on the website and hints that it might be because of usability issues as a competitor who has recently relaunched their news website is seeing strong gains in readership. The MD and Sales Director both alarmed by lack of readership and its subsequent affect on Advertising sales call a meeting apparently impressed by the look and feel of the competitor website to discuss web usability. The discussion soon diverges off the original goal – to increase readership to one about the bells and whistles and look and feel offered by the competitor website and how we can replicate the same. As a product manager your not surprised, after all you had led the project to use web analytics as a means to understand customer behavior few months ago, a strategy which is now bearing fruit.
In such a case one can follow a narrow approach and put it simply – “freshen your website” aka add bells and whistles to bring it up to the times. However, the comprehensive approach that I am prescribing would look at finding solutions to the goal of increasing readership more holistically.
For e.g.
You might learn from your customers that they mainly pay attention to the first 3-4 words in the headline to decide to read an article. Maybe, its time the content/editorial team take a look at whether its necessary to alter how they decide on the headings for the news articles?
From some other customers you might realize that the number of advertisements displayed on the news site are far too many impending their ability to get through the news item quickly ( http://www.timesofindia.com – prime example of website that has far too many advertisements ). Maybe, its time the sales/subscription focus its attention not on volume of advertisements but on the relevancy of them to the reader.
In short,
The argument that I am trying to put forth is one in which rather than optimizing one aspect of usability -i.e web (navigation, presentation et.al) usability. Product managers should take a holistic view when it comes to improving Usability of their products. More importantly, they should impress upon their stakeholders that it is not the Web Development/IT Team that can deliver quick fixes to make the website more usable but rather it would need a multi-functional approach from the get go with each function optimizing for usability and you as the product manager managing the process to bring it to a successful conclusion.
