Understanding usability and the feature specification

You, and everyone on the development team, spend your working lives on this product and devote orders of magnitude more time thinking about it than your customers. They are teachers, entrepreneurs, or bankers who just happen to use your product, and if they can’t work out how to use it in 2 minutes, they’ll give up. They’ll complain your product is a piece of rubbish and get on with their actual job.

UX testing can be broken down into two different sections. First, you need to ensure that the product conforms to the specification – are the user-facing elements present, do they look correct, and is the text as described? This is objective and automatable – does the implementation match the specification? If a button is missing or the color is incorrect, that can be found and fixed.

More often, problems are due to the specification, which is the second class of issues. Your feature might be...