Pat’s Point of View

Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path says—to paraphrase—that usability is a minimum requirement, not a suitable end-goal. Here’s a snippet:

…Legibility and visibility are the bare minimum of requirements for a successful piece of writing or a photograph. Any person who focused most of their efforts on legibility or visibility would probably have almost no chance of being a successful artist…No one tells their kids to aim for a C- and then expects them to get an A.

So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a different place in my pants to put them on. (Admittedly, I do give my 2 year old daughter a gold star for this but then she’s 2.) Usability is not a strategy for design success…Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure…

The comments people have left regarding this post show that many of them took offence to what they thought Todd was saying.

Firstly, I think this points to quite a deep insecurity among ‘usability’ people. Secondly, I agree with Todd’s post, in so much as I have come across many organisations who have it in their head that they have to “do usability” and then everything will be alright. And I wrote about this in my post User-centred doesn’t equal success.

Among the comments are Todd’s efforts to better explain himself. I feel for him since I think I’m quite similar at times, blurting out quite a bald statement and having to explain myself. But honestly you would think readers of the AP blog (especially experienced practitioners) would be able to get what he was saying. Would anyone working at AP suggest usability isn’t something that should be taken seriously? Of course not, the point is that it’s not sufficient on it’s own. It should be a ‘given’, with the goal being to create something useful.

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