Pat’s Point of View

Yes, this is an unashamed rip-off of Jessica Hagy. Well it’s kinda more like an homage to her witty, insightful and very clever musings. I can, however, only ever hope to mimic her use of graphs and diagrams, rather than what she uses them to communicate.

The inspiration for this particular graph is the popularist rollercoaster which the web design industry can often be. Usability, user experience and then user-centred design; a succession of buzzwords that stirred clients and designers alike in to furious fits of corrective work. There’s no debating that at the heart of this movement was a genuine need for a shift in focus for many businesses and website owners (getting them out of the bottom left on the above graph). However, I’m sure we’ve all seen this bandwagon pick up speed at a frightening rate and career out of control. The net effect is that the herd mentality is now “we must do usability”. Blame the pundits for scaring us and blowing things out of proportion :)

For all the success stories (top right) there are still many examples of well-meaning and well executed projects that fall flat on their faces. Despite a user-centred approach, success does not always follow. A successful website (or business) does not necessarily require a devoted focus on user (or customer) goals, behaviours or attitudes. You mean we’re all deluded? Well, to use that old IA chestnut, “it depends”.

Think about how many products and services are a success even though when you take a long hard look (sometimes not even that long) you can’t find any evidence that users were considered at all. Remember the Motorola Razr? That phone is awful to use, nobody I know who has one likes it. But they still bought it, and I even know someone who bought another one after he broke the first one! As the old saying goes “there’s no accounting for taste”, but there’s also the fact that people don’t always behave logically. We buy and use things that suck, willingly and repeatedly (bottom right).

There are other more sneaky examples too, electrical and computer appliances are pretty much built as cheaply as possible as part of a strategy to shorten product lifecycles and increase replacement and upsell. This pretty much flies in the face of what consumers want, but overall that industry is a massive success. In this case we have little choice, and the manufacturers know this. There’s no need for user-centred design here, just marketing.

And the door swings the other way too. Massive amounts of time and money are invested into user-centred design projects to improve things like electricity bills, banner ads. But in the end none of that matters, the chance of success is low (top left). This is where usability versus usefulness can come into play (although it could be argued that it’s not really UCD if both are not taken into account).

All in all, this topic is an interesting antithesis to the usability hype. The fact that there are so many examples you could place in the bottom right (MySpace and YouTube would have to be the poster children of this corner) would seem to indicate that a balance of user-centred-ness along with everything else will give good results. Maybe even better results than a user-centred focus. This discussion could quickly wander into usability ROI, and none of us want to go there do we.

For my parting comment, I’d like to say I really like these graphs as communication tools, since you can easily map out several different factors and spark a discussion. Coming up with examples to plot on the graph can also be quite a challenge, as some of my examples illustrate…feel free to offer suggestions.

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