“Usability is being able to get into a Porsche or a Beetle and being able to drive away” This is how I have heard usability being described.

They say that a Porsche and a beetle share some of the same technology and that a Porsche gear box is the same as a beetle gear box. Quite frankly I don’t know. If I were to drive a Porsche or a Beetle what would probably be really important to me is their usability, and are my needs being met. When I am sitting behind the wheel will I know what to do. Will my current license allow me to legally drive the car, can I find first gear and is the accelerator in the same place it’s always been in. If all that is OK then I start to consider who is looking at me and how the experience makes me feel.

For many of us new gadgetry, innovation and sleek-shiny is fantastic but unless we can understand it fairly easily it confuses us and we don’t really want it.

On an internet site the relationship between usability and innovation is much the same. Given the amazing technological advances on the internet, a website is able to add widgets and whimsicals creating an amazing user experience. However if we do the equivalent on a website of Porsche moving the accelerator to the back seat to make way for a fancy widget, the website will only frustrate the user, and they will leave. Website navigation needs to be clear and obvious, it needs to be where the user will look for it and it needs to be called what the user expects it to be called. A user’s experience on a website needs to be Porsche-like. It needs to be full of shiny awe inspiring polish, but it also needs to have all the essentials and those essentials need to be in the correct place.

One of the important differences between a Porsche and a beetle is the amount of time people spend on them outside of travel - polishing and staring at the leather trim and drooling over the engine, or just staring at the Porsche as it zooms by. A good website is like a Porsche, people will want to spend time on it. A special website walks the fine line between allowing visitors to build upon what they already know and showing them what can be.

A successful internet site gives users the ability to easily find what they want. It talks to them in their terms about what they want to hear and provides them with a standard experience that is within their current framework. But if it is to provide a Porsche experience it will also have something different, something that inspires them. Then the visitor may stay a little longer and drool over the powerful engine provided.