Usability always felt wrong to me. Maybe I’m just unconventional.. or too aware that a line of sheep is amusing. Today it’s touch this, swipe that, take a punt that a text item may be a link or a button… It wasn’t always like this. Remember ‘thou shalt always make a link blue and that link shall have an underline’?
ha… tricked you – that wasn’t a link…
Looking backwards at usability
Mystery meat navigation… what about that? Usability gurus cursing the possibility that a user might not know what they’ll get if they click something.
It all felt a bit wrong at the time. Circa 2004-2006 I remember the huge industry pressures that seemed to go against basic ideas of interactivity; DISCOVERY, EXCITEMENT, FEEDBACK… What we got was ‘same same’ everywhere.
I loved the ‘idea’ of usability, but in retrospect it was clearly taken too far. I consider it the utilitarian phase of the internet. We had to go too far in order to realise we’d left something behind. Now we can blend usability with user experience (the two aren’t mutually exclusive BUT they’re different).
The critical learning of these last 6-8 years is that we can make a system as easy as possible but that doesn’t mean a user will enjoy it, want to do it again, or become loyal to it. We can now see, beyond the document web, that integration, relevance, discovery, and ‘love’ are all driving deeper value in digital.
It’s really quite fascinating to consider the total effort required to interact at a command line level with the web in the early 1990’s.
I remember being up at 3 or 4am in the morning trying to find ways to pull files down via command line from somewhere on the other side of the world and having no idea exactly what I was getting or how long I’d have to wait; but it was exciting (albeit in a geeky kind of way).
I think the excitement is well and truly back. Flat design has gone against a number of trends and this combined with touch devices and responsive (fluid layout) designs has allowed a sense of freedom to come back into the digital experiences we’re having. From a design perspective I’m a little scared by how much can be achieved in something as accessible as WordPress. But that freedom has to be a good thing!
Increasing user effort despite short attention spans
Convention is always on the move.
It would seem that if we plotted the effort we had to expend in digital experiences vs the amount of time we spent engaged, then something interesting has happened in the last few years. More effort, more time, always on, and vastly more useful.
Where is this ‘always on’ and highly engaging digital world taking us?
Deeper and more meaningful digital brand relationships is one answer. How to create and leverage such brands will be a clear focal point of mine for the next few years.
