Compete on Usability

Top challenges to the practice of usabilty

For usability, it's the best of times and the worst of times. At least that was my takeaway from this year's Boston UPA Usability and User Experience Mini-Conference. Attendance was at an all time high, and famous local gurus appeared and spoke alongside a wide range of presenters. A recent salary survey shows that practitioners are paid well and the field is expanding.

Before I opine, I want to note that the organizers did a great job running the conference. It was a terrific experience and I'm already looking forward to next year.

In sessions I attended and during side conversations, several themes reoccurred as challenges to the discipline, with no clear solutions. Among them were:

Fault lines within the field. Several well-know experts called for the pendulum to swing back from "quick and dirty" usability studies, to testing of statistically significant sample sizes. I was not surprised to find these folks all work for large software companies with budgets and long release cycles.  Try working in an Agile development environment and you'll find little patience for these rigorous methodologies.

However, if you're a practitioner, you can't just dismiss these concerns. At first your business superiors may not question your methodology.  But if you recommend changes based on a six-person usability test, and then find even worse results afterwards, it's too late to bring up statistical validity.

This divide goes deeper than just disagreement over best practices. Many of the newer generation of practitioners lack formal training in statistics, and either they don't know what they're missing, or don't consider it relevant.  The more rigorous faction often considers their web-raised peers to be lightweights, not fit to work alongside them on "real" projects.  I think it's best to be versed in the statistics, so even if you decide to run quick-and-dirty tests, you can present them as such and provide the appropriate caveats.

Good design is the elephant in the corner. If you want to make a usability expert twitchy and uncomfortable, ask her how companies like Apple can create acclaimed, wildly successful, and usable products using top-down design without usability testing. For extra discomfort, follow up by asking why there's no evidence that user-centered design works.

An objective look at the most successful products and companies suggests there's huge value in good design. Good design is intuitively attractive to people -- they'll like it and they'll buy it, and brands that produce it acquire a positive aura that turns into money.  We should be spending much more time talking about design processes and enabling great design. Yes, you can define good design. It's measured in sales!

Meanwhile, while good design can change markets, usability is incremental. It's difficult to see how good usability truly can result in innovative products and new categories. In an entrepreneurial age, usability practitioners risk being left behind.

Productizing usability. Okay, this wasn't a theme for most people, but I see it cropping up often. Web analytics vendors continue to push software to replace usability. At the conference, a slick Keynote Systems presenter efficiently marketed his company's remote unmoderated user testing application.  It was the most knowledgeable effort I've seen of products trying to make usability experts obsolete.  Unless practitioners can clearly and consistently articulate the value of the many tools in an expert's personal usability toolbox, they'll start to get squeezed by these intuitive sales pitches.

Taking all these problems together, I believe usability has peaked. The future for practitioners is to keep pushing on the broadest possible definition of user experience, encompassing all end-user touchpoints.  We must keep expanding our skills and learning related areas -- marketing, CRM, and so on.   We have to keep aware of the cutting-edge technologies under development. Soon classic usability will be only a small piece of what practitioners need to master.

Dear (Name Withheld): How to Get Started

I have a colleague who wants to work in the usability field, but doesn't know how to get started.  He has a well-paying job, but it isn't fulfilling, and for years he's taken classes at night towards a degree in user experience. Yet, despite growing dissatisfaction with his current job, nothing much has changed. His dithering is frustrating to me because like most career moves, there's every reason not to wait. Here's my advice to Name Withheld: Usability is a practice. The way to get better and more qualified is to start doing it.

There's plenty of information online about how to conduct usability studies. Find a website you like, or one you don't like, or one someone you know needs help with. Ask people to try using it, observe, take notes, ask questions. Once you've run a few people through the same kinds of tasks, summarize their experiences and draw conclusions.

Caveats: There's much more than one paragraph's worth of tips to doing reliable, diagnostic usability testing. Not to mention, there's much more to usability than running tests. But by the same token, it's not complicated like that wacky graphic you see here. Just try it! Learn by doing in a context where your livelihood doesn't depend on it.

Next, network and find a mentor. This is a magical time online to make quick and easy connections. Social networking, Twitter, Facebook, and other applications allow you to reach out to almost any usability guru or author you've heard of. But *don't* start your mentor search by firing off emails to Jakob Nielsen or some other famous guru. Start small and local by attending UPA meetings and going to conferences. Not only are people you meet locally more likely to help you, you're more likely to be able to help them with something -- and that's the essence of networking. 

For greater professional credibility, volunteer to help a nonprofit, school, church, or other group with their online presence. It is very easy to find websites in need, and very easy to improve them too. Most sites like these suffer mainly because people can only spend a fraction of their time working on them. So improving them only requires your time and attention.

Leverage your current position. If at all possible, try to apply usability to your current job or company. Identify business problemsna and advocate to bring in UX consultants. Find your designers, marketers, or user experience people, buy them lunch, and pick their brains about their jobs. 

Confession time: the real reason Name Withheld's dithering frustrates me is it reminds me of myself. I made a similar transition myself, from product manager generalist to user experience manager, and I'm much happier and better at my job as a result. My only regret is not doing it sooner, and more decisively!

Simplicity is not the ultimate goal

I saw a hotel telephone last week that perfectly illustrates one of my favorite themes: simple is not always more usable.
Here's a phone without any buttons. It doesn't get much simpler than that!  Yet most people wouldn't even consider it a real telephone, because essential features are missing. How do you choose who you want to call?

If a simple interface is your goal, it's critical to know the essential feature set. Simplify past a certain point, and you risk making your product or system unrecognizable. The best way to know the essential feature set is user research, although a survey of competitive products can substitute in the short term.

But wait, there's more!  Over time, the essential feature set increases for a given product.  Early phones used to come like this one, with no controls other than a crank to signal an operator to help you. These days, most people won't buy a phone without a display for caller ID, redial and  volume controls, and more.  Heck, wired phones can seem like a relic compared with the versatility of mobiles.

The ultimate goal is user satisfaction. Meet expectations by delivering the essential feature set, then delight users with a better, more usable interface on those features.

What will we do with cognitive surplus?

Bloggers I follow are buzzing about the Clay Shirky talk on the post-TV cognitive surplus.  I understood it as "Passive TV-style media is going away, replaced by the interactive Internet, and now we'll all use our free time being busy content creators."

His actual talk, however, was more nuanced and believable than a simple, en-masse transition of humanity from passive consumers to active creators.  He managed to address two shortcomings I predicted with cognitive surplus.

TV is fodder for social interaction. When my coworkers chat about the TV shows Lost or 30 Rock, I can't do much but smile and nod, because I watch very little TV. In the workplace, opting out of TV talk is a real sacrifice. In diverse contemporary society, what can you chat with people about, without risk of confusion or giving offense? It's just easier to have safe common experiences outside of work to talk about.

However, Shirky was careful to emphasize that even a small amount of redirected TV time could spawn multiple Wikipedias per year of Net content. If it only takes a little attention to contribute, it's easy to see people playing an online game or posting to an online community while watching TV. They're doing it now, all the time.

TV is rest time. People like being passive. Depending on what you read, television is either the world's most tranquilizing addiction, or a cognitively demanding cultural simulator. Either way, for a long time pundits doubted the PC would ever replace the TV, because peoples' behavior is quite different using these two mediums. No one "watches computer," and no one "uses TV." It's not easy to find exactly what the difference is. Supporting these naysayers, hybrid systems like WebTV and the Apple TV have had no great commercial success.

In the past ten years, though, television has evolved into convergence with personal computing.
Or rather, the TV interface, not the content, is much more like computers now. Tivo changed everything, and new TV sites like Hulu promise to change things further.

My take is that we still must make online content creation easier. It's great that people can watch less TV, but creating anything interesting online is still inconsistent and frustrating for most people. We need standardized widgets for common functions, so that every rich interface isn't a new learning experience for users. We must clearly communicate state in Web applications, so people always know what to expect from our tools. And we need very quick feedback and results when using these applications.

 

Visualizations described with Chernoff faces

My final project on information visualizations was well received by my professor and class, so I want to share it here for thoughts and comments.  The goal of the project was to synthesize the key guidelines about creating visualizations and invite exploration of the subject, even from people not well versed in it.

Chernoff faces of vizualization (PDF, 32Kb)

I used information glyphs called Chernoff faces, line drawing cartoons where each face stands for a record and each part of the facial expression, one data dimension. The literature on Chernoff faces is mixed. Some sources report they can be effective at quick categorization of large, detailed datasets.  Other research seems to show they can lead to confusion and distraction, as people read emotions that the glyphs didn't intend to display.

Even if the use of Chernoff faces is not as well-regarded as scatter plots and Tufte railroad maps, I think the project was successful in inviting exploration of the subject in multiple ways.  One reason I chose Chernoff faces was they're a little humorous. I had a long, intense semester's worth of detail to summarize, and I knew I had some burnout to overcome.  It's okay to be a little goofy sometimes, if it gives you fresh energy for an important project.

As a result, I felt really good working on this project, from start to finish. Not only was I in flow the whole time, at the end all the work I put in came together efficiently.  My preparation was enough, but not too much, and the final layout almost assembled itself.  I hope you enjoy the visualization too.