Ann’s Rant: The Time and Place for Usability

Why has usability got itself such a bad name? I've just had the privilege of appearing on the same platform as some of the most awesome designers and creators I've ever met, at the "Dust or Magic" conference, organised by Bob Hughes of Oxford Brookes University. And several of these inspiring and talented speakers felt the need to explore the constraints placed on their working practice. And most of them were then critical of usability.

I wasn't there representing UsabilityNews (I was talking about my work with a charity that uses digital media to create cultural exchange opportunities between Britain and Ghana), but I found myself taking up the challenge on a number of occasions... over coffee or stronger drinks.

And it made me realise that something important has become conflated in our discourse on design, innovation, users and creativity.

The list of constraints raised at the conference was good and long, so 'usability' was not alone. I picked up the following: Intellectual Property Rights, copyright, Information Architecture, capitalism, self-censorship, research funding, order and process, patents, and technical matters. Some of these are clearly baddies, such as self-censorship: who needs to help cut something down to size when everyone else is willing to do so? And many on the list have value in some contexts, but they may be being abused. After all, is it valuable to protect software so tightly that it is legally impossible to explore the workings of an electronic voting machine unless you built the machine yourself?

But the only constraint that emerged out of the three days in Oxford as a useful challenge was the technology. There was a theme of taking on the limitations and triumphing. The excellent Colin Holgate of Funny Garbage talked of solving 'problems we didn't yet know we had'. And the idea of winning over power, bandwidth, memory, space and time appeared in more than one talk.

But the challenge of people? There was even an open panel timetabled with the name of 'Usability and Workability: are the Userati the new Design Police?' Well, if you haven't seen the list of Userati on Chris McEvoy’s entertaining Usability Must Die webpages, then you won't know that I am one such Userata and I'm not sure I like the thought that I could be cast as part of the problem, rather than one of the good guys...

Chris was speaking and what he said made sense – he attacked guidelines for their lack of context, he poked valid holes in Nielsen's Alertbox for straying into the territory of human resources and economics (see Do Productivity Increases Generate Economic Gains?), he advocated a humane and intelligent approach in working as a developer to meet people’s needs and suggested that designers each 'adopt a programmer' to improve dialogue in the design process. No faulting that...

Nonetheless, several times I found myself saying again that usability 'is that small but essential analytical part of the design process that ensures that the design relates to the context of use and thereby achieves its design goals' – a statement last made in defending usability at a Spiked debate (see UN story The Limits of Usability are Challenged Again).

And I also found myself a lot clearer about what was being misunderstood when usability came under fire.

Anne Miller of the Creativity Partnership was speaking and she reminded us that creativity was a process of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Paula Young, at PricewaterhouseCoopers, talked of the 'creative swirl' that starts her projects – see also my discussion of creative flail as it's much the same thing (Creative Flail and Optimal Solutions).

When one is inventing something new, it is too early to start deciding if it is of value and how. Walt Disney had rooms for dreamers, realists and critics and ideas went through them in turn – being created, planned and evaluated, sometimes iteratively. The dreamer, the inventor, they will have informed themselves about the state of the world and that will come out in their illumination. Anne defined creative as 'novel and practical' – and at this point, the practicality is still the creator's call. This is how we get innovation.

Then, when we are ready to design something with the idea, we immediately ask 'for whom?' (Because design without 'for' is art.) And then begins the user-centred design process. And maybe the champions of this process have already informed the thinking of the innnovator, or maybe not. But here they have to come into their own.

So, it's all a matter of timing. Too early and the idea doesn't struggle into life. Too late and a lot of money gets wasted and emotion invested into products and services that dont work as well as they could.

And that's it really. I wish I could have said that at the conference, but the panel on Design Police got cancelled due to lack of time. Too much else that was new and exciting was struggling with the constraints of the conference format – and hurrah for that...

[Many of the speakers made contributions that might interest readers, so stories from the conference will be appearing over the next couple of weeks.]

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