The Limits of Usability are Challenged Again

Many events focus on the benefits of usability, according to the online publication Spiked. "Human-Centred Design: The limits of usability", held last week as part of the Spiked autumn season on information technology, brought together usability professionals, designers and accessibility experts; then placed more contentious issues firmly at the centre of the debate: does human-centred design have any limits, and indeed can a focus on human-centred design have any negative consequences?

Definitions of usability are part of the problem, according to speaker Ann Light, editor of Usability News and author of a book on website design. They not only influence how usability specialists market themselves, but also colour public perception of the profession.

Light saw usability as very much part of the design process, apolitical and following a brief. Usability should be seen just as much as an attitude or a state of mind about the need to find good solutions as about any particular process, she said.

The activity of human-centred design, on the other hand, is moving from, 'prioritising performance to designing for experience', a move that Light considered exciting 'because it takes in more of the whole person'.

The idea of user experience has now made its way onto the corporate branding agenda – a move that perhaps inevitably leads towards the idea of a particular set of experiences.

But Light believes that the important issue today is figuring out how users can participate in the design process. When we are increasingly moving towards a matrix of complex networks, with each user needing to configure their own network environment to best suit their own needs, then so-called 'end-designers' will emerge, she said. Such a movement would be in exactly the opposite direction to the corporate idea of common, closed experiences.

This could be described as customisation, a concept that has a patchy record according to Light, but she stressed that 'we now need to enable users to construct the networks and services they want', so making customisation more usable will be key to developing the idea of human-centred design in the future.

The idea of many different users was also picked up by Peter Bosher, director of accessibility company Soundlinks, and former chair of the British Computer Association for the Blind. Bosher felt that although many of us might appreciate whether websites are accessible or not by disabled users, non-disabled users are probably unaware of the extent to which the blind person's experience as user is radically different.

'On a web page I have to start at top. It's a serial approach. My user experience is really nothing like your user experience of the same web site.'

So while designers may discuss a common objective of a high quality user experience for as many users as possible, the user experience that is being discussed is not at all uniform. And for the blind user, the screen contents may be no more informative than 'blue icon dot asp'.

Bosher feels there are moral, legal and business reasons why designers should fall into line with accessibility considerations – there are two million blind and partially sighted people in the UK, after all, and many more with other reading problems.

'Blind people and other disabled users are very heavy users of technology,' according to Bosher. 'They use it to compensate for things that can't do in other ways – it has been a real liberator.'

But if moral considerations are at risk of disappearing from the agenda as soon as designers returned to their desks, as Bosher suspects, legal constraints should be there to uphold the rights of the disabled, he believes. This may in many cases be the only solution to the 'blue icon dot asp' phenomenon, although the size of the constituency excluded by the absence of accessibility should ensure that the issue is placed firmly on the business agenda, too.

Bosher was by no means advocating a prescriptive approach to design to accommodate usability: websites can often be made accessible without compromising the 'nice slick user interface'. It's not about saying 'Flash is bad', rather a question of making today's software better able to work with screen readers, for example, or ensuring that adaptive software keeps up to date with developments in web software. At present, it's often six months behind, according to Bosher, leading to disabled users being excluded.

Design consultant Martyn Perks viewed usability as something opposed to innovation. While, 'innovation supplies an unforeseen need, providing rewards to businesses that rise to the challenge' and 'challenging self-imposed limits', usability is part of the climate of limits, supporting incremental rather than radical change, and in the same camp as risk-aversion and the fear of losing customers, according to Perks.

Perks claimed that the recent focus on usability by business is part of a failure to uphold high expectations about users and their needs – users are being muffled in cotton wool.

Perks' position did not find many supporters. It was seen as a 'false opposition' by some, while others argued that co-incidence of a rise of usability with a slump in innovation does not support causation: 'I don’t think that lack of innovation is a problem with usability – it's just something that's also happening', said Light.

The idea of incremental versus radical change also had its opponents. 'Most of our best designs get modified gradually,' said Light. 'God knows what the first teapot looked like, but we don’t reintroduce the dribble.'

Bosher, too, saw the 'innovation versus usability' argument as drawing a false dichotomy. 'I’m not advocating that innovation be limited, or that the use of new technologies be constrained.'

Having started from very separate positions, all the speakers agreed that there was a need to break away from the idea of 'one size fits all' in design terms. That idea doesn't work for people with disabilities or even the able-bodied.

'If everything is made accessible to everyone,' said Nico Macdonald, 'this could inhibit the usefulness of products to their intended audience'. While there are clearly some products – such as the video recorder – that don't need to be designed with the visually disabled in mind, added Bosher.

More important, said Bosher, was to design products to 'degrade gracefully', so that blind and other disabled users can get some kind of experience from the product. And the ideas of usable customisation of a network experience, and flexible designs that degrade gracefully, are perhaps different sides of the same coin.

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