A Case Study in Software Usability

A Case Study in Software Usability

A Case Study in Software Usability

Complexity kills, period. Feature wars have defined the competitive enterprise software market for many years. Regardless of the target industry, developers have focused on pouring hours and hours of work into adding a myriad of niche features to their core software product. While the majority of end users never utilize these add-ons, it provides the sales department with leverage to out "bling" the competition or at least offer a response to competitive assertions. This practice has gone a long way toward cluttering UIs, losing focus on core product value and pandering to an illogical competitive impulse. A recent trend in software development flips this practice on its head and instead focuses on core functionality and usability. Newton Software, an upstart developer of applicant tracking solutions, is a prime example of this new software design philosophy.

Applicant tracking software is considered by most to be a backwater when it comes to software innovations. Many ATS products still rely on balky downloaded applications originally designed before the web-based software revolution. A basic review of the different products on the markets will reveal a range of front-end user interfaces with many design cues from the late 90's. On top of these industry wide issues, the feature battle has been raging amongst the competition from the beginning. Those products that have lasted through the years show clear signs of feature bloat that detract from the core value of applicant tracking and management. Frankly, the ATS industry has suffered from out or control pressure from their own marketing departments.

As a newcomer to the already over-saturated applicant tracking industry, Newton's developers were faced with a dilemma on how to position themselves in a software market that generally competed on extraneous features. Fortunately, grounded by a long background as technical recruiters, Newton's development team instituted a core design philosophy that emphasized usability as the primary factor in all development decisions from the beginning. This philosophy dictated user interface design, feature additions and sales practices for the fledgling software company.

Extreme usability requires a software's functions and mechanisms to be so completely self-evident that, at a glance, users should be able to determine how to use the product. This emphasis on simplicity must be reflected in a product's interface. Given the important of UI, the Newton Team decided to adopt simple, universal symbols and visual cues to help reduce the products learning curve to an absolute minimum. With Newton the entire recruiting process is managed through an ultra-clean interface that presents the user with a large green button to pass a candidate along the recruiting funnel and a large red button to reject the candidate. The entire core functionality of submitting a candidate for review and reviewing a candidate revolves around this simple and extremely effective user interface.

For Newton, additional feature are always considered through the lens of improving the software's ability to increase hiring efficiency and decrease their client's cost per a hire. Any feature that passes this litmus test is then designed and integrated with the intent of absolutely minimizing clutter and maximizing an end user's understanding of the new feature. For example, Newton's recruiting analytics highlights bottlenecks in a company's recruiting process. This feature has been designed to emulate common analytics platforms like Google's Analytics program so that many users who interact with the feature already have some familiarity with the functionality.

Finally, the delivery platform for enterprise software has a major impact on usability. Newton was fortunate to enter the market as Adobe's flex product became available to developers. From the beginning, Newton was designed to be web-based and operating system/browser choice independent. The choice of delivering their software with flex enabled Newton to avoid cross-browser compatibility issues. This decision also avoided requiring their clients to download an application. Ultimately Newton's web-based, platform-independent software product allows their new clients to implement the software in a fraction of the time that many competitors require to get up and running.

As company's move away from the "battle of the features", the software industry will improve the return on investment delivered to their customers. Software that requires less learning is more likely to generate a higher percentage of active end users. On top of the obvious benefits of emphasizing usability, the practice often results in shorter implementation times for new clients. As corporate customers, let's hope this win-win strategy entices more developers over the fence.

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