Digital Media Buzz > If You Build It, Will They Come? Web Usability v.2009

If You Build It, Will They Come? Web Usability v.2009

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By Ned Smith

Back in the 1990s when the Internet still had that new-car smell, just having a web site was often enough to generate traffic and draw the tire kickers to your URL. Building it was enough to make them come and “cool” was the mantra for website design. Issues of user friendliness were tabled for future discussion.

That conversation was launched in earnest in 2000 when Jakob Nielsen issued his manifesto, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. “The Web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment,” Nielsen wrote. “He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouseclick away.” Web design hasn’t been the same since.

DWU unlocked the floodgates and let a thousand web design consultancies bloom. Standing astride this cottage industry was Nielsen’s corporate home, the Nielsen Norman Group, preaching a Spartan approach to Web design that favored streamlined engineering over aesthetic flourishes.

Though Nielsen Norman is still the éminence grise looming over Web design, time and the Web have moved on. Flash and other digital razzmatazz are no longer beyond the Web design pale and new technologies and devices such as notebooks and smart phones have arrived on the scene. Increasingly, the digital world is going mobile.

So, how is usability faring these days? Do the old verities preached by Nielson still hold true? Alex Wright is the director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. He began his Web work in the anything-goes pre-Nielsen days. “Like a lot of folks in the Web business, I’ve had a bit of a circuitous career, working at various times as a journalist, librarian, designer, researcher ― and once upon a time, burger flipper,” he says. “I started my first Web job back in 1995 at IBM, during the Wild West era of the Web. Back then we were all making it up as we went along, but over the next few years I began to work with some of the human factors engineers in the company’s software group, where I received some on-the-job-training in user-centered design techniques.”

From his experience in the trenches, he’s come to believe that usability is only one part of the user experience. “Usability is one characteristic of a good user experience,” he says, “but usability alone is rarely enough: A good experience should be both usable and useful ― and sometimes surprising, delightful or even challenging, like a game, for instance. In terms of usability per se, however, the basic factors have been pretty well-established by now, thanks to the work of folks like Jakob Nielsen, Bruce Tognazzini, Jared Spool and others. Clarity, consistency and simplicity are some of the key criteria that come to mind ― and, as Don Norman says: ‘maximize affordances!’”

Though Nielsen is derided by some critics for being too simplistic and too much of a minimalist in his Web commandments and strictures, Wright is quick to acknowledge Nielsen’s earned stature in the field. “You don’t hear designers talk about Nielsen quite as much as you did a few years back, but nonetheless his work remains foundational to the field,” he says. “Personally, I thought Nielsen got unfairly maligned for a while as being too strict and doctrinaire. I had the opportunity to work briefly with Nielsen on a project for Macromedia many years ago, and found him a pleasure to work with ― smart, insightful, and much more open to new interface concepts than I expected ― nothing like the Dr. Usability caricature that sometimes attends his reputation.”

Alexis Lloyd is addressing some of those new interface concepts. She has more than 12 years experience as a multimedia and interaction designer and is now a creative technologist in the Research and Development Lab at The New York Times, where she investigates technology trends and prototypes future interfaces for content delivery. One of the trends she’s investigating is the device explosion and the shift toward a ubiquitous computing environment.

“Several years ago we used to talk about device convergence ― the idea that we would end up with the One Device that would be all things to all people,” she says. “That’s actually the opposite of what’s happening.” Instead, she says, we are navigating a multi-device ecosystem that tends to revolve around a mobile phone, a laptop or netbook and a TV. As Moore’s law continues to drive down the cost of computing power and sensors become more prevalent, Lloyd says, “computing and connectivity will be embedded in ever more devices. Digital information is moving out of an abstract information space and into the physical world. We are shifting from having general-purpose computers or devices to having single-purpose objects that happen to have computers in them.”

It was much easier to design consistent and usable interfaces before device proliferation. Back in the day when the desktop was king it was easier to understand user behavior. The user would be sitting in one place looking at a screen several feet away and using a keyboard and mouse to interact. “Now there are even more variables to consider,” she says. “Your users may be stationary or mobile, viewing content on a 50-inch screen or a 3-inch screen, interacting with a mouse or a finger or through ambient sensors. The question becomes: How do we provide a seamless and consistent user experience across multiple devices, channels and interaction methods? Not only does each device have to provide a good user experience, but they need to support cross-device interactions, which require an understanding of how people use their devices, not just individually but in concert with one another. We’ve developed a prototype in the R&D lab called Custom Times, which supports these kinds of interactions. If I’m browsing Custom Times on my mobile device and see a news piece that contains video, I can drag that story over toward the television, and a high-definition video will play on my TV. Or I can save an article from my mobile phone and it will be easily accessible to read later on my laptop or desktop.”

The advent of social media exacerbated the challenges facing digital designers. “While the same principles of human-computer interaction can apply to any kind of software interface,” Wright adds, “social media does introduce a new dimension to the equation: people are no longer using software interfaces to interact with machines alone, they are now using those interfaces to interact with each other as well. One of the main differences is that social media systems need to allow for a higher degree of user control and freedom — to make sure people feel fully in control of their data and their personal relationships. Facebook has had some well-publicized struggles on this front, but let’s face it, this is still uncharted territory: The best practices are still evolving.”

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