I’m not sure if Todd Wilken’s blog post on Why usability is a path to failure at the adaptive path blog was just venting, or maybe even going for the “99% Something Inflammatory” blog topic methodology, but I took Todd to mean what he said, and I kind of dug it. Here’s why. For years I’ve been noticing that products with a lot of soul or strong vision don’t seem to need usability at all. Big Steve’s stuff of course, and even MySpace before it became dead to me and I deleted my account, seemed to rise above the need for any usability in the traditional sense. But products without a lot of soul, or a vision that’s naturally diluted by large numbers of stakeholders, seem to need usability hella bad. So in honor of products and services that are lucky enough to fall into the first camp, I’ve made this t shirt for Todd that you can order from Zazzle and the rest of us to wear to our next design research meeting for a product. For some unkown reason, the inspiration for this t shirt came from Jeff Veen’s awesome bet combined with that recent Entourage episode.

Month: August 2007

Of course by now everyone knows what we mean by “Live Recruits†– they’re usability recruits that we snag when they’re in the midst of visiting the website we’re testing. It’s most often done through mini-surveys on a DHTML overlay (not a popup!). If someone fills out our survey and they’re a match for our target quotas, they’re contacted and interviewed immediately. There’s no scheduling participants and no lag time between the time when a participant is on a site and when they’re interviewed. We talk to them about the tasks they were already doing: no make believe required. It’s the closest way we’ve figured out to observing users interact with a design in their real life circumstances, without artificial barriers of the lab.
Product Detail is King
Just this week, we’ll be presenting the same usability finding that has come out of three separate studies. We’ve been calling the finding “Product Detail is King.”
It may sound obvious, but when users are looking at products online — whether it’s software, healthcare, or crockpots – detailed information about the products is of utmost importance. And a user’s success in finding that fine level of detail can truly make or break whether they have a positive experience on the site.