Usability: Commoditization and Distinctiveness
A few months back, an article on the end of usability culture appeared in Digital Web Magazine that apparently struck a nerve. A lot of comments, posts and other articles resulted, including some fairly coherent rebuttals. Now, at a healthy remove, I think everyone got it sort of wrong.
That is, a debate about “usability culture” misses the point; in fact, there isn’t a usability culture in any meaningful sense of that phrase. Instead, what’s critical for usability as a professional field is that it’s being commoditized without being broadly understood. Meanwhile, an actual culture - the culture of distinctiveness - is flourishing. And a major chance for usability to become a required and complementary part of a powerful, longstanding ideology is passing us by.
Let me define some terms and explain further. I cite “usability culture” in the same sense that Knemeyer and Cheng (above) do, for the sake of simplicity. By “culture of distinctiveness” I mean the long-present dynamic in any developed country wherein a given organization wants to stand out from the crowd, at least to some audience. To put that another way, it’s the impulse of any organization - even nationalized ones like the US Post Office, or nonprofits, or universities - to have a brand. There are some individuals, of course, who just want to blend in. But almost no institution does. And this relates to usability because, to the extent any organization has some kind of interface, there’s constant pressure for that interface to be distinctive. And that pressure still far outweighs any imperative to make an interface usable.
Before continuing that thought, let me explain why “usability culture” is a misnomer. As one of the Knemeyer rebuttals mentions, usability is still barely penetrating general corporate hierarchies. Yes, perhaps people are fighting over who “owns” the user experience. And yes, the ranks of companies that claim expertise in user-centered design are swelling. But most people – even at companies that rely pretty heavily on websites – still have no idea what usability means, even in general. This is not the case for software development. It’s not the case for visual or graphic design. It’s not the case for marketing, sales, or ad copywriting and public relations. Heck, even procurement means more to more people in more organizations than usability. Certainly, there’s a community of usability professionals. But partly because few organizations really understand who we are and how to value us, this community can’t be said to meaningfully drive the creation or even design of interfaces, overall. At least, not yet. So, debating the qualities or “death” of any culture associated with that community is premature at best, irrelevant at worst.
This is why I think a more pressing concern is whether or not usability, though not broadly understood, is nevertheless becoming a commodity. And is therefore losing the traction it might have been developing within the larger culture of distinctiveness. There’s an increasing number of agencies and consulting firms that include user design as a segment on their sites. Leaving aside the core interactive agencies and user-centered design firms that have been successful since 1999 or before, we’re talking about the newer “customer experience” consultants, graphic design and development shops. Even if corporations still don’t have a fix on usability yet, these newer players certainly do. Being a competitor, I can’t determine how informed, seasoned and professional usability services at such firms might be. I can only hypothesize that the appearence of such “integrated usability services” is part of continued efforts to get clients to attach value to usability offerings – by finding a business metaphor that works better than “usability.” I.e., the “customer.”
Here, again, the culture of distinctiveness is at work. The usability profession as it relates to the Web in partcular is still quite young, and already it’s disappearing from the vernacular. Or, it’s being subsumed by older and more familiar terms; this is what I mean by it becoming a commodity. Forget about there being a culture that’s evolving to be more creative in line with business. These days, it often seems like “usability” for organizations is just an item on a checklist when it comes to interfaces, rather than a critical first phase of development. And the effort of firms like mine to be more distinctive, so they get business, is accelerating this attitude. This is not to say that making the profession easier to understand, more relevant, isn’t important. It is.
However, I’m not sure that all of this blurring of marketing terms is geared toward making organizations understand that, in an era of interace omnipresence, usability is an absolute key to distinctiveness. Not a post-development smoothing of the edges. Because the culture of distinctiveness is so fast, mercurial and faddish, it’s easier for something to stand out if it actually works AND looks good. Not one, not the other. Both. To cite a really tiresome example, look at the iPod and its interface. It continues to be distinctive in a consumer market that is wildly fickle in large part because it’s easy to use and works. Despite higher prices and a proprietary format, and it’s an exception.
This clear correspondance between distinctiveness and usability is what’s key. And what’s needed is not necessarily for supposedly uncreative or inflexible user-centered design professionals to lighten up. Nor for companies to hear more from consultants about customers (although this isn’t proven to be terrible, yet). It’s arguably for usability professionals to spend a little more time asking themselves, and explaining to clients in plain terms, how usability itself can be more useful. Perhaps phrasing it in terms of customer experience is the only way. But I’d like to think there are others that better capture what I’ll call the “quality” of usability…
