About this site's lack of design: Yes, it's supposed to look this way — I'm helping create a new sandbox theme for WordPress (see it on GitHub).

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

|

Design and Usability: Part 3

If the two words design and usabil­ity are men­tioned together
you can be sure that user test­ing will fol­low within a few sen­tences
or para­graphs — at most. But what about the steps taken before throw­ing
your design to the lions? Start­ing a web project implies col­lect­ing and defin­ing
nonex­clu­sive fac­tors that will influ­ence how things will look, feel, com­mu­ni­cate
and function.

You Don’t Start With Usabil­ity Testing

I’m not talk­ing about user test­ing (or user needs specif­i­cally), but
rather generic top­ics that influ­ence the level of inter­ac­tiv­ity, func­tion­al­ity
and even­tu­ally usabil­ity. (Un)fortunately there’s no golden rule or set
of axioms which can be fol­lowed or imple­mented dur­ing the devel­op­ment of any
given web site or user inter­face — each project has dif­fer­ent require­ments
(on all lev­els). For exam­ple: a news site is not an online shop and a weblog
is not a search portal.

Not hav­ing a pre­for­mat­ted or stan­dard­ized list of (all) ele­ments and details
to imple­ment at your dis­posal dur­ing the design phase, does not mean the entire
process should be unstruc­tured. I think a col­lec­tion of global denom­i­na­tors
can help struc­ture the process and make sure the design fits the pur­pose of
the web site (goals). Before I men­tion some of these generic fac­tors which guide
and direct (to a cer­tain degree) a design process, let’s look a bit closer
at how such a process would apply in practice:

Structure, Guidance and Direction

 

How Design and Usabil­ity Relate

As depicted above — generic fac­tors orig­i­nate from exter­nal
enti­ties and vari­ables (i.e. the world). I don’t think many projects
would end up being suc­cess­ful if inter­nal fac­tors and pref­er­ences were to be
taken into account exclu­sively. Design and usabil­ity flow from a sen­si­ble and
bal­anced mix­ture of both inter­nal and exter­nal infor­ma­tion. Draw­ing from my
own expe­ri­ence, dis­cus­sions and projects with Dan, an aca­d­e­mic arti­cle enti­tled
“What
Is Beau­ti­ful Is Usable” by authors N. Tractin­sky, A.S. Katz, D. Ikar
and com­ments
made by Andrei
Herasim­chuk (who cur­rently works for Adobe
Sys­tems and has worked on the inter­faces for Adobe Pho­to­shop, Adobe Illus­tra­tor,
and Adobe InDe­sign), I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that indeed “the
per­ceived aes­thetic qual­ity of an object or sub­ject is intrin­si­cally locked
with how users expe­ri­ence func­tion­al­ity and usabil­ity” (adapted from a
state­ment
pre­vi­ously made by Andrei). But I disgress…

Dude, What About Your Generic Factors?

I’m con­fi­dent that every designer worth his salt has already come up
with a few generic fac­tors that influ­ence design and usabil­ity deci­sions. Design
and usabil­ity are even­tu­ally about com­mu­ni­ca­tion and inter­ac­tion (HCI).
Below I’ve summed up some of the fac­tors that could be taken into account
start­ing a project:

Above I’ve tried to answer four ques­tions: Why? Who? What? and How? These
generic fac­tors will enable the def­i­n­i­tion of how design and usabil­ity will
be imple­mented through­out the project. Does this mean we’ll get it right
from the start? Not likely. We’ve merely estab­lished a hypoth­e­sis —
we think or assume it might work out as planned. It’s at this
point that you throw your design to the lions (the beta testers or an exter­nal
pool of users). The lat­ter is a process of trial and error — dis­cern­ing
and adapt­ing ele­ments that did not work as expected (back to the design phase
and pro­to­type) and keep­ing ele­ments that have a pos­i­tive or intended effect.

This Is Not an Exact Science

Nat­u­rally I’ve abstracted some ele­ments or steps in the process. Fur­ther­more
design and usabil­ity are not exact sci­ences. Thus 1 + 1 often does not equal
2; it’s more along the line of 1 + 1 equals some­thing you didn’t
expect. Feel­ings, opin­ions and per­cep­tions play an impor­tant (if not deci­sive)
role, but they’re sub­jec­tive (dif­fi­cult to struc­ture). The best thing
we can do is work towards an effec­tive out­come. An out­come that is unfor­tu­nately
con­sti­tuted of fac­tors, ele­ments and dri­vers of which most are (partly or com­pletely)
unknown.

So what’s your take on the sub­ject? What fac­tors do you take into account?
Did I miss any? Where do you put the empha­sis: aes­thetic qual­ity or func­tion­al­ity
— or is there no trade-off nec­es­sary (both being intrin­si­cally linked)?

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Sunday, January 25th, 2004.

Categories:

You can follow comments on this item via the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments are closed.

3 comments on “Design and Usability: Part 3”

  1. Posted by Mike on Sunday, January 25th, 2004.

    I truly do not believe there is a trade-off between aes­thet­ics and usabil­ity. The oft-quoted (but sel­dom ref­er­enced) say­ing goes like this:

    “In any­thing at all, per­fec­tion is finally attained not when there is no longer any­thing to add, but when there is no longer any­thing to take away.” –Antoine de Saint Exupery

    In regard to the aes­thetic qual­ity of a given inter­face, I believe that a well-designed site is also inher­ently usable — if only for the fact that usabil­ity con­sis­tently grows from simplicity.

    That’s what design­ers do. We take highly com­pli­cated things, and com­mu­ni­cate them visu­ally in the most sim­plis­tic man­ner pos­si­ble; which, in itself, is beauty.

    BTW: Great illus­tra­tion. The page is hosed in Safari (Jaguar) though.

  2. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Monday, January 26th, 2004.

    “I believe that a well-designed site is also inher­ently usable — if only for the fact that usabil­ity con­sis­tently grows from simplicity.”

    While I think I under­stand the gist of your point, I wouldn’t phrase it as such. I would never claim a well-designed site is inher­ently any­thing. It’s chances of being more usable are more prob­a­ble than com­pared to a poorly designed site. But beware the assump­tions that must be made on the part of oth­ers to infer that well-designed some­how equals sim­ple. I do agree with you BTW, but when preach­ing to hea­thens, one must sym­pa­thize or be cog­nizant with the way they view the world. 8^)

    I wrote up an arti­cle on my own design process that is some­what tan­gen­tal to Didier’s. You can find it here. I don’t get into specifics on what cri­te­ria or types of data I use in the explo­ration phase, which might be a good thing to write up at some point.

    Gen­er­ally speak­ing, though, my start­ing points usu­ally rely heav­ily on struc­tural con­cepts, things that have to do with the nature of the object I am work­ing on. For exam­ple, when work­ing on Pho­to­shop, it was more impor­tant for me to under­stand every­thing there was to know about how pix­els and raster images worked before I got into any­thing else. I really feel the research phase, of both tech­nol­ogy and the audi­ence, on any project is eas­ily the most important.

    This is not to say I ignore other fac­tors listed in this arti­cle. It’s just I find that I get fur­ther along in the exploration/generic fac­tors phase when I have fully come to under­stand the nature of the thing I am work­ing on. It’s like tak­ing apart a stereo, or a remote con­trol, or a car engine, and really get­ting how the thing was put together to make it operate.

    Once I have a grasp on this, then I find I can tackle design issues. With­out it, I tend to wan­der, stum­bling in the dark.

    BTW: This page is not hosed in Safari and Pan­ther. 8^)

  3. Posted by Dan R. on Monday, January 26th, 2004.

    We’re try­ing to nail down the cause of the dis­play bug in Safari 1.0/Jaguar, but we don’t have any machines run­ning 10.2 any­more, so: if any­one is expe­ri­enc­ing the dis­play issue Mike reported, please email a screen­shot to me (use the link at the top of the side­bar) so we can fix it swiftly.

    Or, you can just upgrade to Pan­ther, where every­thing looks quite spiffy :-)