Ann's Rant: Stop, or Dr Nielsen gets it! - the Backlash in Usability?

In 1998, Jakob Nielsen's ubiquity led a reviewer to comment that the man was not as famous as Elvis. Four years on and with an estimated 2M readers a month, the man is still less famous than Elvis. But the attention paid him keeps growing, though these days more of it is negative.

Some of the criticism he is now drawing comes from the very community he represents. A few years ago, Jakob was King and we were delighted that someone had managed to raise awareness of usability and the benefit to design that involving the user might yield. That has now given way to a frustration with the authority he commands.

Is he always right? Does he approach every problem in the most effective way? Is he meeting all the challenges of the networked economy? The answer is obvious. He is extremely knowledgeable and a good communicator, but, particularly in a new industry responding to rapidly changing technological challenges, no one person can offer it all. With Alertbox, Nielsen has locked himself into saying something original and useful every two weeks – even after several years. Sometimes his topics for comment are no longer confined to what all would define as user-centred design. But Alertbox remains a wonderfully authoritative platform.

Are we now bored with him? Maybe. Are we mad at him for being too successful? Who knows...? But the more serious matter is the issue of conformity. Usability is feeling the brunt of the dot-com crash, Sept 11 and the new conservatism, just as other parts of the design chain are. Lack of research time and money in the design industry has made people hungry for simple solutions to difficult problems. Lack of research time and money has had a similar effect more locally on methodology. A failure in academia to react fast to business challenges, a failure to disseminate the successful work that has been carried out: both have contributed to the paucity of debate, the invisibility of other approaches to involving end users in the design process. But, in fact, there are many voices in the industry, some saying contradictory things. The dominance of one key thinker means that these quieter voices can be ignored, underestimated or overridden. That must annoy the individuals behind those less successful voices. For the community at large, it's a comfortable if sterile formula to work by.

And it's a safe one. No one wants to air their growing pains in public. As Jared Spool said a few weeks ago (see Feature: Jared Spool, a Man with a Task), we don't really know how to make websites usable. We don't have a means of improving all the electronic interactions around us. We can suggest that any new product should be tested early and tested often. And we can cite the familiar name of Jakob Nielsen to endorse this position.

Nielsen was one of the people singled out for criticism in a talk written up this week on UN (see Prodding at the Limits of User-centred Design for an explanation of why it was a well-intentioned argument with a less than successful outcome). Nielsen was being attacked for producing guidelines. Now the hit rate on UN stories about guidelines bears out their appeal to usability practitioners for all the reasons mentioned above. But others, including last week's speaker, take a longer perspective. They suggest that the usability community is trying to establish guidelines prematurely. Have many versions; have bad interfaces, they say; worry less about the usability and more about whether the product is used. I could digress here into how VHS beat Betamax through better marketing of a product perceived nowadays to be the less effective, but I shan't. There are many influences interacting to determine whether the standard is a good one when it arrives.

Instead, I'll make the point that a mature industry is one with the confidence to discuss anything with anybody. I don’t know if we’ve reached that maturity yet. But we are going to need all the tolerance to debate that we can muster. Last week's attack on guidelines was one of several such critiques on usability coinciding; critiques coming from outside the usability world, spawned in design and business communities that formerly would never have taken the field so seriously. A veritable backlash has been appearing in print: articles on Spiked attacking the cult of the user and suggesting that business is fielding the 'needs' of the customer as an excuse for lack of initiative; Cre@te Online reporting on 'The state-of-play in the battle between the Jakobeans and the designers who think Nielsen is building an "Aryan race" of websites': and, yes, both of these also single out Nielsen to have a go...

This would seem to be the other side of the maturing process. The usability industry is suddenly seen as big enough and ugly enough to fight its own battles, especially by some of its former supporters. How do we feel from the inside? Should we hide behind Dr Nielsen and cower?

Or, after years of proselytising as one voice to convince the IT industry that users are not just an inconvenience, are we beginning to feel secure enough to listen to our critics and each take what is useful? We know that not all our battles are won: my friend Jon was complaining only last week that he found himself again ringing someone up to justify why a tiny fraction of the design budget was being spent on user testing. He's not alone. But can we view this positively and be grateful he was given a chance to explain?

And can we welcome this backlash in the same spirit? Then, even if the motivation behind the criticisms now flying has not been to strengthen our practice, by provoking debate it may be part of the outcome... Now, what does Dr Nielsen say to that?

Associated Link: Who is this woman?

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