MikePadgett.com

I attended a seminar last night that represented the Belgian contribution to World Usability Day.

The conference was hosted by interactive agency Emakina and the theme set by the global organisers Usability Professionals Association was Transportation.

The agenda consisted of presentations on traffic congestion, user experience in online airline booking and social networking.

Usability and traffic congestion

The opening presentation from Joannes Vandermeulen, concerning how usability could contribute to the resolution of traffic congestion, was both curious and interesting.

Vandermeulen compared the current, systemic approach to traffic management with the possibilities of adapting Swarm theory, wondering aloud how direct communication between car drivers might resolve jam situations.

The online airline

So far, so good. Next we heard about an Emakina case study in which the latter had presented client Brussels Airlines with what it called a “user experience mission”.

The idea is to method act the process of booking and taking the flight, from website to take-off, so that the user experience can be considered not as an isolated online transaction but rather in the context of a larger process in which users engage with the brand. Hence the trip to Lisbon.

Of course I appreciate the sincerity of the thinking here, yet it does sound nevertheless like a marvellous jolly too - pity I’ve never had an airline industry client (though some orgs would be more preferable than others: could you imagine doing a user experience mission for SkyChefs?).

Feeling unsociable about the social web

After the break, there followed two presentations on the subject of social networking. Unlike Laurent Goffin, who was riffing enthusiastically about the “social web”, I’ve been unable to retain quite the same level of enthusiasm lately.

And here’s why. As far as social networking’s concerned, I’m right in the middle of yet another perennial cycle in which:

• I have embraced change;
• I have seen opportunities;
• I have accepted that it will have implications for my work;
• I have begun to implement it;

All good. But now, two or three years later, the cycle has predictably evolved:

• My clients have now heard a few acronyms and buzzwords;
• My clients can talk of nothing else;
• My clients call me in and tell me that I must embrace this new and exciting change, discover its opportunities, accept that it will have implications for my work and start to implement it;
• My clients insist on a [insert the social network du jour that's très à la mode] presence

Don’t misunderstand me, I love my clients: they do their thing, they pay my bills and they fill my day with endless amusement. But sometimes they behave like kids. This is the result of having baby boomers in senior management.

In a way, you could visualise this cycle in the same way as Joannes Vandermeulen described wave theory in traffic jams. Think of me as the blue car and it makes perfect sense.

Rant over, but what does social networking have to do with transportation?

And finally

There’s always a risk that this type of event, managed by a company, can end up being a glorified advertising campaign for the host. Whilst Emakina made reasonable efforts to avoid this situation, I did find myself wondering about what other contributors - myself included - might have offered, especially since we were told there had been numerous submissions.

Perhaps with a wider range of contributors there might have been more focus on the theme of transportation, in which I was particularly interested after the recent issue of UX. There might also have been some discussion of media other than the Internet.

Fundamentally, what’s most important is that this event - the Belgian edition of the global initiative - continues to grow. This year’s audience was quite impressive and very encouraging. If I’m around next year, the UPA’s designated theme matches my competences and I hear about it soon enough, then I’ll certainly consider making a submission!

I attended User Experience 2005 this week, the Nielsen Norman Group’s annual effort to make us work for our users.

The event was well organised and well attended, featuring delegates from a wide range of organisations around Europe. Indeed, you could not say with certaintythat British professionals were in the majority.

Nor could I avoid the recurring impression that Usability is actually about discovering what’s right under your nose, about stating the hidden obvious that designers and developers overlook or simply ignore.

Usability is both micro and macro. You have to cover all angles. Experts see the same issues over and over again. Mistakes, omissions, oversights and plain lack of forethought. Testing irons these things out so we can get the current application right and avoid future failures. Some issues are so common that they must be screamingly self-evident to a Usability expert.

Design and development cycles are short in comparison to the collective mileage of user experience, the work of a few being turned over to the scrutiny of many, where poor pages will mean fewer visits. Even designing a simple form can equate to risk writ large.

But good usability practices are a point of difference that can work in favour of agencies such as Torchbox, whose founder I met in Hoa Loranger’s informative session on Rapid Iterative Design.

Usability is inclusive and utilitarian. Some see it as a limitation to design. To practice its methods well requires patience and to some extent tolderance to be added to the web professional’s toolset. I doubt, however, that we would see graphic design for print in these terms, but this is probably because ‘usable’ print is based on centuries of experience. We have to achieve that level of progress on the Internet in a tiny fraction of the time for the medium to continue to flourish.

I was curious about Jakob Nielsen himself. I have read some very disparaging blogs about him in the past. I found him to be a serious sort of chap, not really the flamboyant persona that has been sometimes attributed to him in the press.

Some say Nielsen is anti design. I think it is fair to say that design per se doesn’t come top of his list of interests, because if it did he would be a designer himself. Hecertainly has no time for design for its own sake where it obscures content and functionality. But neither should any of us as web design professionals, otherwise we are in the wrong job, or else we should be artists instead.

I’m waiting to hear whether I’ll be going to the Norman Nielsen Group’s User Experience 2005 Conference in some hotel in London.

There’s no-one quite like egg-shaped uberuser Jakob Nielsen for getting web designers’ backs up. I was amazed to find parody resources on Nielsen from some browned off bods out there.

This is far and away the winner for me, though. What a Winamp skin
designed by the venerable user-too-friendly Nielsen might look like:

“Text is too small” - Nielsen

Thanks to Kottke.org for that one!