Jim Berney's Weblog: Interface Design Experiences

I just got back from a Web Design conference in San Francisco titled "Voice that Matter". What attracted me to the conference was that most of the speakers were also authors, many of whom had authored books I had recently acquired. Thus, it struck me that this might be a different experience, and as expected, it was. It was a great three days that I would recommend to anyone interested in design, the web, and usability of the web experience.

Although I'll continue to blog about specifics I learned during the conference, I thought I'd dedicate my first blog to a few key take-aways.

I'll start with a comment from Steve Krug, author of "Don't Make Me Think", a usability best seller with over 225,000 copies sold worldwide. Steve said that you can learn everything you need to know about usability in a single 6 month semester course in college. Jakob Nielsen later talked about how usability conventions really don't change that much. Although user behavior changes, humans are adaptable, they learn, thus many of the conventions that were in place 10 years ago are still valid. As a usability professional and interaction designer, I'm wondering if a good chunk of my career has been relegated to a semester course in college.

What is becoming clear to me is that today's designers must wear a number of hats and have skills in multiple dimensions including usability, interaction design, visual design, and coding (html, css, javascript, ajax, etc.). The other trend becoming clear is that in the web space, groups are leaning away from the traditional waterfall development model and towards a faster methodology referred to as Agile Development. Agile methods promote short cycles and frequent iterations of design. This environment is ripe for more rapid approaches to usability and a method coined by Jakob Nielsen as discount usability. It should then come as no surprise that Steve Krug preached that everyone should run half-day usability studies each month with 3 participants, debrief your study over lunch, and identify 3-4 key issues that the team can reasonably fix. Even the tasks used to perform these studies were not considered that relevant. Steve commented that it probably doesn't matter which tasks you select, since you would get good feedback on most any set of tasks. Most usability professionals would probably take exception to this method, but the emphasis was on "doing usability" and "getting feedback from users" on a regular cadence, not planning a single, larger study.

So, you're probably wondering if I've lost my mind. No, because I understand that designing for usability involves skill and experience. However, for usability professionals who plan to make a difference in web design, it is clear that a broader skill set is required and that the focus really needs to be on design. Design that engages, fulfills our desires, and delivers a wow experience to the user. More on this as I decompress.