Jesse James Garrett on Ajax, Amazon and Web 2.0

Jesse James Garrett , the man who coined the term 'Ajax' and president of Adaptive Path, has been talking to us about usability and the user experience. It makes for a great read.

Jesse's book, The Elements of User Experience, is one of the most widely read books on user-centred design, and he was recently named as one of the top ten user experience experts in an E-consultancy survey.

Here, we speak to him about the psychological background to web design, the pros and cons of behavioural targeting and Ajax, and why he thinks Amazon and eBay's usability has gone "astray".


- What’s the essence of your approach to usability and user experience?

We tend to think of usability as the foundation of the work that we do. It sets the minimum requirement for a design to be successful, so if you’re not doing usability work you won’t know what that requirement is. Philosophically, that’s where we come from.

I think a lot of people look at usability as the ultimate end goal of the design process, but we don’t see it that way either. We see it as the place that you start, but there is lot more that a design should do than just attaining usability.

Usability doesn’t really get at the psychological and emotional context of use. Usability will tell you, from an ergonomic perspective, what people can do with a product, but there is lot more to making a product successful in the marketplace and making a product feel successful in people’s minds. Often, we find that clients come to us, thinking they have a usability problem, but it turns out that their products are pretty usable. The reason that the product is falling short is it is not satisfying an emotional or psychological need.

- Where do you think the industry is on that learning curve?

I think the industry as a whole is only just starting to get a handle on the broader context of the decisions we make about design. When we started talking about usability in the late 1990s, it was a really radical notion of studying users and figuring out what works and what doesn't when it comes to design.

What we're doing now is moving beyond that and starting to ask questions about the wider context that happens in users' minds when they use products. We're having to develop new methods and approaches to answer these types of questions. I think the industry as a whole is struggling with this, although some companies are more mature than others in their understanding of it.

A lot of these Web 2.0 companies that have been very successful in getting people's attention have a personality to them. It turns out that this really resonates with an audience. People want products that have a personality and to have a sense of who the product is. Traditional usability is not designed to address that, so we have found ourselves looking more to traditional techniques from marketing and branding to get at the emotional component of the user experience.

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