Usability, Anthropology & Bloat
in the land of the dinosaurs

Dear uidesign.net,

I like your `Differentiate by Usability’ article a lot. I think you point out differences that also have implications for research - market as well as product development research.

As an anthropologist, I think that the research we can contribute to the corporate world hinges on the questioning of presumptions. Traditionally, anthropologists have studied exotic people, people with a society and culture very different from ours. In one of her most popular studies, Margaret Mead learned that certain behavioral differences between men and women that we take for granted, even understand as `natural,’ are culturally determined and that men and women in other societies and cultures can behave very differently. In this manner, anthropologists have learned to question our own behavior and thinking as we study other people’s behavior and thinking.

Anthropologists are often integrated in the corporate world because of our technical skills (like observation and open interviewing, or qualitative research in general), but our propensity to question presumptions is our greatest asset. In the corporate world, it is not necessary to question social and cultural presumptions as radically as in the field of anthropology, but what is presently needed in the design of an `Information Age appliance,’ is a questioning of the designer’s presumptions. This questioning is more important than the validation of a designer’s presumptions of how certain users behave and think or the statistical distribution of these presumptions over a given population, i.e. the usual market and product development research.

Since we study users and/or prospective users, anthropologists can radically question the designer’s presumptions, thereby offering a useful contribution to the design of Information Age appliances.

Sincerely,

Rob van Veggel

Hello David,

I have to say that your piece makes a whopping assumption that you oddly leave unaddressed: that issues of usability somehow sprang to life with web/WAP browsing.

Jakob Neilsen does the same thing all the time. Hello? Usability has been, continues to be, and will probably always be a mess with good old fashioned physical device. Gone shopping for a CD player (or any audio product for that matter) lately? The sheer diversity of absolutely abysmal UIs is amazing. Go ahead, kick the tires and sit right on down inside a good ole American car. They are getting better, but they still often have hilariously bad usability. Always will.

Why? Simple. Power. The marketing guys have it and the usability guys have zip. David, how do you show ROI for good usability? How do you calibrate usability? How do you easily demonstrate that your UI beats the pants off the competition? If I have N dollars how much do I allot to dinosaur era doodads vs. usability?

Don't get me wrong, I'm with you brother. Just realize that the dual with dinosaurs has been going on for a llooooonnnnng time. Well, before web browsing.

Regards,
Douglass Turner

uidesign.net reply:

I have to admit to being somewhat mystified by this comment. We are not trying to argue that usbaility is important or not. Your note seems to take the view that American industry and a User Centered Design approach are mutually exclusive. This is certainly not what we are seeing. The argument about whether usability is important or not or should be part of the engineering lifecycle is one for another day and another article. It certainly wasn't part of this article.

The article starts with the assumption that you are already taking a User Centered Design approach to a new product and have to communicate what is good and compelling about it to management. The essence is that the traditional rules for product comparison just don't work. If your design approach is different then so too must be your communication approach and your evaluation criteria.

The point is that you can't compare feature lists with an Information Age appliance because it isn't being targeted at a mass market and in fact shouldn't be. Mass features equates to no or little usage. Failure! In the manufacturing world it doesn't. More features means more bases covered, a wider market. This is not true in the wireless web world. Those extra features just get in the way.

I hope that clears it up.

Regards,

David Anderson
Editor

Douglass replied:

I realize my comments were on aspects of usability your article was not written to address. Part of my motivation was my lurking suspicion that without significant power shifting to usability folks and UCD everything you say in your article can be correct (and of course it is) but nothing will change.

My guess is that the first few waves of WAP applications will be (and already are) basically useless. My current favorite is room33.com. They are a tiny Swedish WAP shop featured in the April Red Herring. They are a good candidate to take a look at since they attempt to map the same service to Web and WAP. While the Web app is harmless (a MS Outlook knock off) the WAP service is just plain broken. Have a look.

The sad fact is that the public has been trained to only ever expect poor design. Bummer. Perhaps well designed WAP services will break this trend. Keep the faith, baby.

Regards,

Douglass

Hi,

'What is old is new again'. Can't remember where that quotation comes from. I have been banging away at the less-is-more drum for many years. Although your rust belt executive spin on it is new. And you are right that usability is the acid test. But is it much deeper and more pervasive than that? Feature bloat reaches back throughout the software achitecture to produce method bloat, message format bloat, and database bloat (aka denormalisation). Accelerating the entropic death of systems, and at enormous cost.

Phil Bradley

Hi,

Great article.

All I can say is the obvious...it's easier said than done. Many of my daily struggles include trying to convince marketing and advertising executives that graphic design is not more important than functionality online. It's an old argument for those of us that work with this all the time but these executives still believe that an attractive graphic will build the brand and thus, close a sale.

My argument back to them:

"In a web environment, you just made a conscious decision to damage the brand instead of enhance it."

This concept is just too far removed from what some of these people know and I would also clarify one point in your editorial...these "industrial age dinosaurs" do not only live on top. There are plenty of them down in the ranks as well which is evident by the number of web environments out there that have been designed with the company in mind rather than the end-user.

Thanks for letting me chime in...

Jonathan Segal