Usability Is Not a Feature. It's a Standard.

Every time a person fails to complete a task online — a form they cannot submit, a button they cannot find, a government portal that crashes at the final step — it is not a technical failure. It is a design failure. And most of the time, it was entirely preventable.

Usability is the discipline of making things work for people as they actually are: distracted, stressed, time-poor, and often using a phone with a cracked screen on an unreliable connection. It is not about making products beautiful. It is about making them work.

The Cost of Not Doing It

Bad usability has real costs — both economic and human. In enterprise contexts, poor interface design slows down workflows, increases error rates, and drives up support costs. In public services, it can mean people cannot access benefits they are entitled to, cannot register a business, or cannot file a complaint.

Poor digital usability costs India's public sector thousands of crores annually in abandoned transactions, repeated helpdesk calls, and failed service delivery — most of which could be resolved with basic user research.

Why Usability Gets Deprioritised

Usability is consistently underinvested in because its absence is invisible to those who built the product. Designers and developers have knowledge of how the system works. They fill in the gaps automatically. Users don't.

This is called the "curse of knowledge" — and it affects everyone who builds things. The only reliable cure is testing with actual users, early and often, before you have too much invested in the current design to change it.

What Good Usability Practice Looks Like

It starts with clear task analysis: what are users actually trying to do, and what stands between them and success? It includes regular usability testing — not expensive lab studies, but simple moderated sessions with five to eight people that surface the most significant problems. It includes accessibility by default, not as an afterthought.

Critically, it includes the discipline of measuring usability after launch — not just traffic and conversion, but task completion rates, error rates, and time-on-task — and treating those numbers as serious quality metrics.

Usability as Respect

At its core, usability is an expression of respect. When you test your product with real users, you are saying: your time matters, your ability to succeed matters, and we are not going to make you figure out our internal logic.

In a country as diverse as India — with wide variation in digital literacy, language, device capability, and infrastructure — usability is not just good design practice. It is an equity issue.

Organisations that take usability seriously make better products. But more importantly, they make products that more people can actually use.