MikePadgett.com

At User Experience 2005

— Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Jakob Nielsen.”

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. He certainly 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.