Some of my most popular blog posts have been rants on poor usability. That such rants from a layman are popular and accurate reflects poorly on the current state of product and software design. It’s as if consumer electronics and software were astronaut tools, designed by earthbound marketroids with no knowledge of microgravity.
Yet usability is not astroscience.
I wouldn’t call myself a usability professional, but I’m happy to take on the mantle of usability expert. As should you. In my mind, all users are usability experts, and have a duty to speak out against poor usability and product design. After all, what is usability if not the ability for casual consumers to get the most from a product? And who better to decide the success of that product’s design than the casual user?
Instead, we’ve fallen into a lazy, disinterested mode of consumption. We put up with crap design and poor usability in exchange for ubiquity and “innovative consumer-driven synergistic marketing opportunities” – products and designs foisted on us because we fall into some definition of a particular market segment. It’s an extension of what Paul Lukas calls inconspicuous consumption:
It’s about deconstructing the details of consumer culture — details that are either so weird or obscure that we’d never see them, or so ubiquitous that we’ve essentially stopped seeing them. This can mean anything from a bizarre canned good, like sauerkraut juice, to a beautifully designed light-industrial object that we’ve always taken for granted, like the Brannock Device (that gizmo they use to measure your shoe size).
In the same way, we’ve stopped caring about the way our products are designed. We assume that modern shampoo bottles have to be aerodynamic, and that electronic volume controls have to be buttons. We take it as given that registration is required on many websites, and that every software package must have a hundreds of different “options” in the preferences pane.
On Usability
(4 posts) (3 voices)
-
Posted 1 year ago #
-
Mike
InactivePosted by unregistered user: MikeGreat post – I have to agree that everyone is a “usability expert”. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes difficult to get that feedback from that consumer expert. Buying behavior is influenced by so many factors that good or poor usability may not be tweezed out… How can we as usability professionals get the feedback we need and how can consumers easily provide the feedback they want to give? Usability studies, contextual inquiries, ethnographical studies all have their downsides – useful yes, but oftentimes influenced by the Hawthorne effect…
Nice post… looking forward to more!
MikePosted 1 year ago # -
rob-nz
MemberYeah, it's an interesting topic.
You'd think that companies that seek the most input from their 'usability experts' (aka comsumers) would have the most successful products, yet one company that consistently scores very highly on the usability index for its products does virtually no market research, focus groups or public betas.
I'm referring of course to Apple, where the popular perception is that you get what Steve Jobs thinks you should have.
I guess it helps that the guy seems to have a genius for consumer product conception and styling, as well as an anal need to control every aspect of the product production and quality.
I have no idea how true the popular myths are, but certainly you never see an Apple product until his Jobness decides it's ready.
(Which is not to say he always gets it right - Hockey puck mouse anyone?)
By contrast the Microsoft approach has always been to seed their products widely in progressively public field releases and iterative improvement of the products once they go public.
This means of course that the inevitable warts in pre and early production versions are very public and there can be a fair amount of poor press and user discomfort while they are squashed.
Certainly products from Cupertino are shinier once they come out the door than those from Redmond.
Having said that,Win 7 and Windows server 2K8 have got to be the most finished products from MS I've ever seen (and I've worked with everything from DOS 2.0)..
Not wanting to get into an OS Holy War here, I'm totally neutral on this one, (OK, I'm liking Ubuntu and Windows 7 at the moment, but that's just where my time is spent in my day job. If someone wants to give me a Macbook Pro I'd be happy to play with that too - or if I ever find time to hack up a Hackintosh) however I do understand the nervousness of Apple stockhiolders when Steve sneezes.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Daniil
InactivePosted by unregistered user: DaniilIf you will allow me, I’d like to use this occasion to rant about the usability of the ASB debit card.
My main complaint is that is completely counter intuitive and every EFTPOS terminal deals with it diffidently.
It has a magstip, so you should swipe it, right? Well… not exactly. You can swipe it and then it will ask you to insert it into the chip reader. Of course you could try to be proactive and try to insert without swiping, and that may work occasionally…but not always. And then… there is the random reader that will work by just swiping it. Argh! And don’t even get me started on the location of said chip reader on each terminal.
Posted 1 year ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.
