Working on my thesis explaining User Experience made me think why I often had this feeling that “amount-of-click-counting” usability professionals do not get it. Also why I prefer the title of an Interaction Designer than the one of a Usability Engineer. Eventually their goal is the same, creating a good user experience , which requires both sides. Good usability is a basic requirement since a frustrated user will not have a good experience. The interaction design is needed to influence the experience in making it fluid. As you see, it’s they are two sides of a medal.
So I came across this post via one of my favourite blogs: John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. It started like an interesting commentary on user interfaces until I read his e-mail vs. IM scenario. Tantek claims that email seems more heavyweight than IM since it requires more than 3 times more staps. While I think that this is perfectly valid, I also believe that he misses the main problem, which is not measuarble (countable, etc.): Mail not only needs more clicks to compose, it also is sent somewhere where the recipient has to ACTIVELY FETCH it. In contrast, IM PUSHES the message to the receiver and the user can pretty much rely on that the recipient will get it directly (or as soon as logging on). This makes the communication faster – yes, instant.
This solved my issue about why “count-the-clicks” engineers do not get it. Their attempt to count and measure things are means to measure unmeasurable things. Soft thing about how some things feel, what kind of associations are implied by something can not always be mesaured. Fine notions about actions like to “delete” things vs. to just “move” them cannot be measured by a standard scale. Only reasonable measurable guideline would be along the lines of: “Minimise use memory.” While such guideleines like steps are valuable, they are not a guarantee to the best user experience.
In this sense I’s claim that Usability Engineers (the “step counters”) are good for making the details of an interaction smooth and simple and Interaction Designers (the “expression communicators”) are needed for shaping the big picture of the interaction.
Update: Gruber now posted a valuable follow-up where he also emphasises the importence of preception over the actual fact.
Good point…
the funniest part is the common misconceptions that people has on our work.
Some people thinks we are artist that can make any crappy page “look” pretty… if it was so I would do better making nice paintings for a gallery and earning a living on it…
Other people thinks that it is about the “amount of clicks”… but what can you expect.. most of them are first engineers and not designers…
Others just think we concentrate our work around usability testing and that this is the only and unique activity we focus on…. if they just knew how much work takes to do a proper analysis and get to the real starting designing point, even before we get to some tangible “result”..
I am sure it will take a couple of years before people really understands what we do… at least we can try creating the culture around it and keep on doing “click-monkey-counter” job when needed ;)
Yo, welcome!
Hmm, this is why I find it always important to emphasise that we need more time. The problem is that this “more time” moaning is traditionally used by everybody and therefore filtered by experienced manager ears. ;)
Wolf: Just mention $$$ and watch them have second thoughts ;-)
Heh heh. Thanks for the tip, Trev, i’ll give it a shot next time. ;)