Usability, design, or both?
It’s one of the biggest interaction design related debates. Should we make sure something is measurably better than something else in terms of efficiency and ease of use or should it simply address people’s needs regardless of how? It crops up not only between design and HCI students but design professionals and usability specialists. It’s the whole useful, usable, and desirable deal that we learn about so often.
Jakob Nielson wrote a couple of weeks ago asking Should Designers and Developers Do Usability? I don’t want to be too judgmental about the guy, but this article makes me wonder if he is a little out of touch with things. Like many others (I’m looking at you Don), he wants to put people into neat boxes that do certain things. There’s this ridiculous view of designers as artsy touchy feely people that create things on a whim, and that considering usability, a very planned and logical practice, is of no interest to them.
“Design obviously appeals to people with a drive to put things together, whereas usability requires analytic thinking and conceptualization skills.”
His argument is that having specialized people, like himself, around is the best case scenario. Or you could sign up for the not-so-subtly-plugged 3-day $20,000 seminar. I agree with him to a certain point. Sure, you can’t have one person doing everything, but I think he’s stereotyping designers a bit here. There is plenty of analytical and conceptualization going on when designing.
Which is why I like the new title-grabbing article from Adaptive Path on Why usability is a path to failure. Not because he is bad-mouthing usability, but because he is saying that it’s not an end or “Usability is not a strategy for design success.” Which I agree with completely. I think the author goes a little too far though. There is some point in the process where it does become the focus. You have to set aside your thoughts and dig in. Like in his example, there is a point when developing that a photographer is spending their time getting their prints developed with the right exposure, cropping, etc… and making sure everything is clear when taking it through the chemical process.
So I guess I sit in the middle. Usability shouldn’t be the entire focus of a product, but there should be some time and energy dedicated to it at some point depending on the constraints. I think Jakob makes a good point in that the value of usability professionals is that they might have a lot of experience with user behaviors and might be able to correct some problems. But don’t we do that as well?
Excellent post.
My answer is yes, interaction designers, as part of their value, consider and design for behavior. In essence, we make things more usable as part of our process. Sure, someone can specialize in that. But usability isn’t the thing that makes great design.
Jakob has been riding his on curtails for years, and has long past his usefulness; or perhaps, one might say, he is a usability disaster.
Just a quick follow up comment is that although we can agree that usability is an important factor in a design, not all designers have a good sense of it.
He was saying in his post that considering proper usability to a designer is analogous to people putting on pants. There are plenty of people who are designers who might not have learned that in or out of school. Getting the details right on which buttons should take you to what screen and what they should say is not always part of an interaction designer’s experience or schooling.
Which is why the people hired to do that stuff usually have the knowledge, whether or not they are designers. My main point is that just because someone is a designer or even interaction designer doesn’t mean they always have the best usability sense or even include it in their process.