World Usability Day: Morning After
I hope everyone had a good World Usability Day! Bill and I went to the local UPA chapter event on usability in healthcare. The first few panels were interesting (featuring a social anthropologist and human factors engineer), however I was really surprise how few people were at the event, especially compared to last year and the turn out at the local conference last month.
Cheers to Jared Spool who points out the shortcomings of usability and why WUD is harmful to usability practitioners. His complaint is one that many have made over the past ten years against usability: usability “specialists” point out problems, but they fail to fix them.
The scenario: The client does not have the necessary design skills to create a usable interface, so hires a usability “specialist” to identify problems. The usability “specialist” identifies problems and gives the client a nice fat document stating so, however does not provide design recommendations. Without design skills on the client end or design suggestions from the usability “specialist”, nothing progresses. At best, the client can subscribe to trial-and-error until they figure out an interface which tests well.
This is similar to a discussion Bill and I had last night. Different groups want to “own” usability, but there really is no such thing by itself. The self-described “usability specialists” test and report on problems but never provide useful feedback on how to fix them. The concept of “usability” exists in information architecture, visual design, user research and experience, product development, etc. but take away any of those disciplines and you take a piece away from “usability”. In my opinion, the heyday for “usability” was five years ago, parallel to the internet technology bubble. Since then, other disciplines have been fighting back and educating the rest of the world that they’re a part of usability too.
The word “usability” was a bad word in open source development for a while, and maybe for good reason. I’m beginning to think its a marketing term and not a good design process. This is a delicate position for me to be in, being a coordinator for the KDE usability project and OpenUsability member. I feel those two organizations are driven by responsible “usability specialists”, who are in practice designers, information architects, psychologists, and any or all of the accompanying disciplines which help build successful products. I imagine the industry views us as understaffed and overworked, trying to fill the gaps in all parts of the engineering cycle, rather than specializing. In reality, we just know how to address our client’s and user’s needs really well.
Usability is more than user testing. Usability is design. Maybe the industry could take a lesson from the Open Source usability community and learn how to work better with their clients.
I agree with you completely.
“Usable” is an adjective, like “Fast” or “Red”. Who owns those words?
Now, I believe there are skills that help you make things more usable. And people who study and practice those skills are valuable. But they are only part of the solution.
I believe we have to rethink how we position these skills within the organization and efforts we are trying to help.
Nice post!
Jared
My biggest objection to useability is most people focus on the novice. An easy to learn interface and all that.
Fine, so far as it goes, but most people become an expert at something, and they spend most of their time doing something they are an expert at.
When I took useability classes (in 1996), useability was actually given in 2 different issues: learnability for the novice, speed of use for the expert.
The novice needs to discover a new interface, but quickly becomes better. Experts need varing levels of speed. Learnability sometimes conflicts with speed.
Sometimes saving just a tenth of a second is significant to the bottom line, even if it means you have to spend a week teaching someone how to use your interface. (saving a tenth of a second per minute, adds up if you are talking hundreds of people doing the same task, every minute for years on end).
KDE has often critcised Gnome because their focus on make things easy for the novice means they eliminate features that experts like to use all the time, but just confuse the novice. It is important to see both sides of this though, as those expert features often are confusing (for discussion lets assume this isn’t fixable, though in most cases good design could fix the problem), so they should be added only when the experts actually use them.
This issue that you, and others, have raised also tends to beg a question: With so many “usability” people out there beating their chests about how important “usability” is, would they *finally* be able to sell it (usability) if they were to stop simply producing critiques of bad designs and start to produce usable designs? With organizations and “gurus” out there working out ways to sell usability services, perhaps what they’re failing to understand is that they have been delivering clients only half the product. They need to not only deliver a critique but design solutions as well.