Usability seems to be a very illusive concept that draws in experts from many fields. Unfortunately, it seems that despite the very assertive guidelines and opinions, the experts from many fields such as cognitive psychology seem to lack the fundamental agreement what the usability really means.
One usability company gives such guidelines. The traditional (paper) media has a bad user interface featuring
* static form – users can’t adapt the representation form to their needs
* linear representation
etc.
A good design on the other hand features:
* user centric design – user chooses how and when he uses the page
* usage of small icons and grouping them
etc.
This reveals the fundamental lack of understanding of the essence of the usability – the offered guidelines are able only to scratch the surface of the topic offering some quick (and false) heuristics that are not applicable to most of the design situations.
Let’s start from the fundamentals, why do we need user interfaces and usability in the first place? For the suprise, usability is not at all that important what the common conception suggests. The basic property of all artifacts is the utility, not the usability, meaning what goals can you achieve with the object or service. A goal is something that is desirable by the user. Most often the goals are indirect, you need to work only because you want to feed your family. Personally you would like rather spend most of your time with your friends and family, or with your hobbies such as playing golf. Several different solutions allow you to fulfill the goals, such as greeting your mother on her birthday. The old fashioned solution is to take a train and visit her. An alternative solution to achieve the personal goal of remembering your mother is to take the cellular phone out of your pocket, select her number from the phone book and calling her. The difference which device you will choose is in the usability – the cost of achieving the utility (or your goal). Nowadays, when the time is money, most of us will choose the mobile phone to minimize the spending of the very limited temporal resources. Another equally important and related resources are the mental energy for learning new things and the monetary cost of using the device. One reason of the bad usability of the early computer-based solutions is the novel utility – you don’t need usability if there is no alternative ways achieving it, or if they are even more cumbersome than the computerized version. However, the situation changes dramatically when someone else designs a competing computerized solution.
When one reads an old fashioned news paper that has evolved over hundreds of years to fulfill the goals of the subscribers, the importance is not on the dynamic or static form of the media, but on how well the media is able to fulfill the hunger for news of the readers. The problem of a newspaper is not in that the the user can’t see the tv-guide or cartoons on the front page, but has some internet-based competitor been able to publish the same news earlier making it uninteresting. The high contrast and large page size out competes any screen in it’s ability to visualize information. From the usability poin to view the situation is the contrary, if the web page designer does not know which goals the web page is supposed to serve, he can outsource the understanding and analysis to the user by saying ”the user knows the best what he needs, so let’s make the user interface dynamic and customizable so that he can modify it himself”. Unfortunately it seems that even smaller number of users (than the number of so called UI experts) are able truely to design user interfaces, so making the UI customizable is not the solution for usability problems, it is only passing the buck when the designer does not know what the usability truly means. Instead of forcing all users to spend their time in moving the boxes around, the designer should focus the development efforts in analyzing deeply what are the true user goals, what is the context of use and in which priority the goals should be served.
A second widely propagated false belief and design practice is that when you serve a new user goal or add a new functionality, you should make compromises in the design so that reaching of all goals are equally difficult, or adding a new functionality makes the reaching of the primary goal more difficult. One of the most desperation causing example of this design fallacy is the dismissal of the Navi-key by mobile device manufacturer Nokia. Once this leading phone manufacturer was the most easy-to-use phone on the market, it had only one key for all functions and the market share sky-rocketed. However, then came the so called smart phones and by the result of a sad design story you couldn’t anymore use only one key for both answering the phone and calling to your grandmother. The compromised design, the enemy of all usability was born once again.
During my first master’s thesis I created a new concept called marginal usability, which is the utility divided by the sum of cost of time to use, mental energy and money. This simple model encompasses the most important design guidelines in an easily understandable package. To reach the highest marginal usability, you need first to select a highly desirable goal that you want to fulfill. If you wish, you can choose a few more and prioritize them by their benefit for the user. According to the GUIDe -design method by Sari A. Laakso, the first design step is to take the highest utility goal and design an user interface that makes it possible to reach the goal by the least number of physical and mental steps. Most often this goal can be reached trivially by single or even by zero actions. Take an example for the newspaper. The scoop that you see advertising the tabloid papers implements exactly this purpose by zero clicks, you need to just walk by a news paper counter and you will be almost unavoidably be exposed to the scoop of the day! You don’t need to even take the paper to your hand, open the front page, or buy the paper to know of the latest plane crash or celebrity affair. A true marvel of the user interface design, that is easily reachable also for any site or software! The only thing you need to do is to forget all excess waste and steps on the path of fulfilling the true user goal, such as the intro-pages and registration phases. Challenging the tacit assumptions of the industry leads you easily in revolutionary innovations, you don’t need even to look very far away. Remember also to question the technical constraints by challenging the strongest bastion of bad usability – the developers. If you bother to spend a few minutes on your goal analysis, you quickly realize that you can save substantially in development costs by dropping all the unnecessary screens and functions that are not really needed for any goal. The ultimate design is reached when you can reach a very high value goal by zero clicks. A few examples of these transparent user interfaces include an open doorway (you can pass it without much effort) and an internet infrastructure router. You will notice the best designs by the fact that you can’t see them, and the cash flow from outperforming the competition.
Antti Hätinen
Pharazon ab
Concept & User Interface Designer