methods that can identify lead users, their unique characteristics, and homegrown innovations in order to remain relevant.

May + June 2009

revised, enhanced, and shared through open source forums.

Similarly, less tech-savvy users also have the ability to make modifications and “produce” their own products. A plethora of online tools has allowed users with limited technical skills to publish, communicate, create, and organize. Even 10 years ago, publishing a blog or sharing photos required dedicated software and a certain level of expertise. Sites like Blogger, Facebook, and Flickr provide usable streamlined functionality, templates, workflows, and platforms that allow novice users to produce content and create their own sites. New parents provide baby blogs for extended friends and family, for example. While Facebook and Blogger pages may not have high “design style,” they do allow novice users to publish content and customize their pages in sophisticated ways.

These users are engaged, innovative, and creative, but they are unlikely to be understood or addressed using standard usability methods. Again, we face the variability problem and the long tail. Standard usability methods rely on the similarity between participants (e.g., 90 percent of users did X) rather than focusing on individual innovations or usage patterns. The novelty and insight of the lead users can get lost within the aggregate of the usability collection. And we can only anticipate the modification barriers to be reduced further and the percentage of hackers to continue to grow. If user-driven innovation and content continue increasing, anecdotal evidence will begin to outweigh the generalized statistics of usability. We will need to shift toward design

Engineers Can Design
on Their Own

When the usability field exploded, the Web was a nascent tool with few standard paradigms. Usability’s rise (and potential fall) mirrors the Web closely. Early on, usability was needed to evaluate potential pitfalls with existing sites and propose guidelines to design against. The Nielsen/Norman Group made a mint by providing detailed guidelines for specific contexts: for e-commerce, site maps, gift-certificate workflows, corporate intranets, etc.

And while these guides are useful, there is now a flood of successful examples to emulate and an archive of research to mine. We have discovered, tested, and refined the best ways to design basic tasks: organize a form, display a pull-down menu, define pagination, highlight items in a list, etc. Certainly, usability pioneers like Jakob Nielsen deserve a hat tip for laying the crucial groundwork. Looking forward, however, we can reasonably assume that many of the simple problems have been solved and we are working up the ladder of complexity. If many of the basic usability problems are “fixed,” are more complex assessment methods needed to address the more complex issues that remain?

Second, many of the traditional usability methods quantify data that we no longer care about. Lab tests, heuristic evaluations, and computational models focus solely on goals like

efficiency, accuracy, and initial ease-of-use. While these metrics were relevant early on, they are rudimentary at best. Common system-design techniques like use cases and scenarios should make fast, straightforward, and learnable UI design a given. Again, there are thousands of relevant, successful, timely examples to baseline against. And the “new” metrics like affect, stickiness, buy-in, loyalty, and engagement are nearly impossible to test within the confines of classic usability. How can we revise our core tool set toward the new metrics? How do we reprioritize the services we teach, use, and sell based on the current environment (rather than the past)?

Lastly, with the growth of the Web and usability, clients are likely to know the underlying usability principles, be familiar with the core heuristics, and have already solved the obvious “gotchas” in their products. They may even have in-house usability departments, labs, and protocols. Fewer and fewer clients need to be reminded of the basics. The heuristics we test for and baseline against are pervasive; at some level, we’ve put ourselves out of business. We need to provide more to clients than the same basic assessment from a decade ago. But how do we work with embedded usability departments and dated testing protocols to continue improving our clients’ products? Are different methods, different deliverables, or different workflows needed to address the “new usability”?

 

What Do We Do Now, Knowing It’s Terminal? Given these five impending trends, the field of usability must