Carl Kim, Usability Specialist, The Usability
Company
Did you hear the one about the usability
specialist who is also a poet? His poems are in bullet points and
devoid of metaphors.
Moreover, they are half the length of the original draft, and
half the length of that again. The language is succinct and in
layman's terms; there's one proposition per stanza, and each
stanza is short. To avoid subjectivity, lest it create ambiguity,
his poems are preceded by a conclusive summary. And of course, as
always, his pieces of prose must also rhyme, as that is what his
readers expect to find. You can see what I'm getting at: Is
usability incompatible with creativity? Does it stifle
originality?
As a usability specialist I often find myself being acutely
aware of the implications of my recommendations to those in new
media who are creative by vocation, such as graphic designers.
This is because one of the basic tenets of usability is minimising
cognitive processing by users, 'the need to figure out what they
need to do'. Thus, many of my recommendations are premised on the
pursuit of:
- Abiding by standards and following conventions
- Minimising relearning
- Consistency
- Catering to the lower common denominator
- Avoiding marketese (promotional marketing style with
subjective claims)
In contrast, one of the many aims of graphic design is creating
something new, something fresh, vis-à-vis being creative. So you
can see the potential conflict between two disciplines:
- One wants to call the shopping basket for a car dealership
'the shopping trailer'; while the other wants to keep it as
'shopping basket'
- One wants to use the image of a dog eared page and the label
'turn overleaf' as a link to the next screen of an online
annual report; the other recommends a button labelled 'next'
- One wants to have a paragraph of copy as a bitmap image in
order to ensure the text is in a specific size, in the
corporate typeface of New Baskerville, which is a typeface
that does not come standard with an operating system, and with
correct leading, kerning, and tracking. The other wants it in
HTML text in sans-serif, left aligned of course
- One wants an animation in Flash on the homepage, which takes
up most of the screen, as this will present the business as
being dynamic and progressive. The other recommends using a
smaller image in .GIF or .JPG. with a two line text summary
The above examples are real life examples from my and my
colleagues' experiences.
And it's not just graphic designers - I have also experienced
marketing people and programmers respond in ways that suggest they
see usability as curtailing their professional creativity.
Stereotypically, the former wants to use colourful (but
potentially ambiguous) language to convey information; the latter
wants to showcase the latest 'cool' technology, but which doesn't
work on some browsers. The usability specialist evaluates the
prototype and grants neither of the wishes.
So is usability destined to be a thorn on the creatives' side?
Certainly not. The aim of usability is not about suppressing
creativity and originality, but more about knowing the target
audience and addressing their needs while simultaneously
addressing the client's business needs. Simply put, it's horses
for courses.
Therefore, for a website dedicated specifically to web graphic
designers I would expect the page to be designed for viewing at
1024 x 768 since almost all web graphic designers will be using at
least this resolution instead of the 800 x 600 resolution that is
more common with the greater online population. On another site
whose primary objective is to service architects I would expect to
find technical terminology pertaining to architecture. If another
site were to be promotions based, perhaps consisting of a
competition, then it is likely (and appropriate) that the copy
would be written in 'marketese' style.
Of course, for the majority of websites it's not as clear-cut
as these examples. So the question remains: Why is there a greater
emphasis on usability in new media (for example the web) compared
to other forms of communication such as books, magazines, radio,
and so on? I do not presume to know a definitive answer, but I
will point out some explanations.
The Web is ubiquitous: a user can access a website without the
temporal and physical constraints, especially those of a
specialist journal that can only be attained through a
subscription or in a library. The individual pages of such a
journal, or even of any book, can be considered in the context of
the entirety of the publication, in its physical bound entity
between the front and back covers, and where quick reference can
be made by flipping through the pages.
In contrast, a user can directly access a page within a website
via a deep link for example, from a search engine or another site.
Unlike the individual page in a book the individual web page must
shoulder the responsibility of representing the overall site. A
user deep linked into a site needs to be contextualised: the web
page must faithfully represent the brand, the business' or the
site's reason for being, offer assistance to users, provide
orientation and similarly provide access to other areas of the
site. Therefore, an individual web page needs to be a
self-sufficient entity at the same time as being a congruent part
of the overall site (think of a regiment that forms part of a
battalion). That this is a significant burden for one screen to
shoulder is evidenced by the amount of screen real estate taken up
by elements, such as navigation and brand space that are not part
of the main body content. According to one analysis by Jakob
Nielsen such elements account for 43% of the space on a webpage.
It's a pain looking at a web page
Another fundamental difference between the web and a medium
such as television is that the former tends to be task driven and
this includes looking for information, whilst the latter is
generally for leisure. I won't elaborate on this as it has been
widely commented on, other than to state the obvious: tasks
require effort and people want to expend as little effort and time
as possible, unless it's for pleasure.
This goes to the heart of usability. By definition usability is
the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users
can achieve tasks (to paraphrase ISO 92411). The need for
efficiency and effectiveness is much more important on the web
because it can be an uncomfortable medium to interact with:
- Screen resolution: computer screens have a resolution that
is 1/4 to 1/8 that of print, making onscreen viewing tiresome.
As well, computer monitors generally have refresh rates
between 60 and 95 Hertz which again can cause eye strain
- Virtual space: the user's interaction is confined to a
2-Dimensional interface, and which is therefore limited in so
many ways compared to a 3-D physical world
- Speed: although Internet connection speeds are improving and
a greater user base is now on broadband, it is still not
instantaneous. The processing speed of computers is another
determinant of response time
These are some of the reasons why usability has such an impact
on interface design. Objectives needs to be much more focused and
stringently followed mainly because there is more at stake with
the Web from bad usability. The currency of usability carries much
more weight online and website builders need to be canny with
visual design, language and other forms of content. Such an
approach is not exclusive of creativity, but it is about how to
best meet the carefully identified objectives, and creativity may
be one of them rather than a given by-product. I will end with a
quote from Mark Twain, who was indeed a very creative individual!
'I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long
one instead' - Mark Twain
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