Discuss How to prioritise usability problems

Nice article, I'm often surprised at some of the things that I see marked as important or critical issues in usability reports and likewise some of the issues marked as moderate.

A moderate issue on a critical task is often more severe than a severe issue on a lesser task.

I see you use a 4 point scale of severity. I have been using a 3 point scale but tend to have too broad a range for 'medium'. I think I'll give this scale a go from now on.

It is very important to prioritize all your findings. It's also a good way to "sell" your work. In our organization we still have the problem to convince and make the stakeholders understand the severity. If you come with 50 problems without any rating it’s more difficult for them to take it serious and also, where should they start…

We have been using this exact technique very successfully, I would recommend everybody to follow this model. It’s both an easy evaluation to do and gives a result that is easy to present and understand.

Good article, David! Very convenient, very practical.

The power of this approach is that it offers a convention. The various stakeholders can follow it and apply it to all kinds of problems, not just usability problems.

Dealing with usability problems is a challenge but when usability problems are joined with all the other issues that a development team has to deal with, then the convenience of a uniform severity scale becomes clear. The development team has to address all issues, not just usability ones. If they have a uniform scale, it becomes possible to compare for example, the memory leak issue that causes the application to stall after 40 minutes of use to the usability issue that users do not recognize that they can click a table cell and edit it.

If my internal issue rating scale has three levels, and someone reports problems on a 4-level scale, I will understand it but I will have a hard time comparing usability and other issues.

Development teams often regard usability work as a second-grade activity, so as usability practitioners we will make a favor both to ourselves and our clients if we try to match our problem prioritization scale to the one that clients already use.

Excellent article David - thanks. A concise, useful look at wading through the fluff and getting to the actionable points.

I'm a total usability beginner, so this is invaluable information.