Once you have validated the workflow meets your customers’ needs, evaluate the tasks to ensure that they are easy to complete. Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which your solution can be usable by your customers. These evaluations validate that the tasks are easy to complete—a test of the ease-of-use, not the intelligence of the people using it. If the tasks are hard or impossible to complete, then your solution is not easy to use.
Pre-development usability evaluation
There is, at the least, a one to one hundred dollar return-on-investment (ROI) for correcting usability issues prior to development (Gilb, 1988, IBM, Forrester, etc.). Eighty percent of the issues can be identified by evaluating it with as few as three iterations with five participants that match your target audience (Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer, 1993, etc.). Conduct the evaluation on workflows and tasks that your customers determined to be most critical. Measure the efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction by time on task; completion of task; and expected and actual perceived easiness of the task. Completing a simple task – like ‘signup’ – has a higher perceived easiness than a complex tasks – like configuring a database. ‘Little or no instruction’ is the gold standard for “frictionless” interactions.
Correct any issues in the design releases from iteration to iteration. Document the evaluation in a report that explains who participated in the evaluation, what was evaluated, how it was measured, the findings, and recommendations based on the findings. Use these findings and recommendations to determine the final design, and develop design specifications for Development.
Post-release usability evaluation
After the solution has been in production for six to eight weeks, conduct a follow-up usability evaluation to ensure that all the issues have been properly addressed and measure your usability ROI. For example, if you knew the number of service calls associated with a particular task in the previous release, measure it now with the new release. Multiply the number of call reductions by the cost of a call to calculate the actual dollars saved by this design.
Document your ROI and any other issues that may have been discovered that you can incorporate in your next design solution.
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This blog was updated August, 2026
Van Tyne, Sean. Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software. Pragmatic Marketing. 2010