The other day, a popular tech blog over in Poland wrote up an article mentioning our app Bounce. As a result, we received over 15,000 visits from excited Polish designers and developers who checked out our tool in order to read the article.
Since the article was written in Polish, most of the people visiting did not know much about Bounce beyond the little blurb mentioned in the article. English was not their native language, so they relied on the usability of the tool to guide them through. This got us thinking: what would be the consequence of making Bounce not intuitive to use? What impact would one usability problem have on these visitors?
Here is how we calculated the impact:
1. Let's say one usability issue causes the visitor to click around and ponder what to do next for 5 seconds
2. 15,000 visitors times 5 seconds each equals 75,000 seconds (20.8 hours)
3. This is the same as burning through 4 fully charged laptop batteries per day for no reason.
If you want to take it further, if you had 15,000 unique visits to your site every day, you would burn 29 laptop batteries per week, that's 125 laptop batteries burned a month for absolutely no reason.
You can imagine how much time and energy is lost if you do the same calculation for a larger trafficked website. Think about how many batteries were burned and hours wasted when The Wall Street Journal had a usability issue with their iPhone app.
Usability does not just make our lives easier, it saves us time and energy. It's the small details that have a huge impact.