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Carl Kim, Usability Specialist, The Usability Company
Did you hear the one about the usability specialist who is also a poet? His poems are in bullet points and devoid of metaphors.
Moreover, they are half the length of the original draft, and half the length of that again. The language is succinct and in layman's terms; there's one proposition per stanza, and each stanza is short. To avoid subjectivity, lest it create ambiguity, his poems are preceded by a conclusive summary. And of course, as always, his pieces of prose must also rhyme, as that is what his readers expect to find. You can see what I'm getting at: Is usability incompatible with creativity? Does it stifle originality?
As a usability specialist I often find myself being acutely aware of the implications of my recommendations to those in new media who are creative by vocation, such as graphic designers. This is because one of the basic tenets of usability is minimising cognitive processing by users, 'the need to figure out what they need to do'. Thus, many of my recommendations are premised on the pursuit of:
- Abiding by standards and following conventions
- Minimising relearning
- Consistency
- Catering to the lower common denominator
- Avoiding marketese (promotional marketing style with subjective claims)
In contrast, one of the many aims of graphic design is creating something new, something fresh, vis-à-vis being creative. So you can see the potential conflict between two disciplines:
- One wants to call the shopping basket for a car dealership 'the shopping trailer'; while the other wants to keep it as 'shopping basket'
- One wants to use the image of a dog eared page and the label 'turn overleaf' as a link to the next screen of an online annual report; the other recommends a button labelled 'next'
- One wants to have a paragraph of copy as a bitmap image in order to ensure the text is in a specific size, in the corporate typeface of New Baskerville, which is a typeface that does not come standard with an operating system, and with correct leading, kerning, and tracking. The other wants it in HTML text in sans-serif, left aligned of course
- One wants an animation in Flash on the homepage, which takes up most of the screen, as this will present the business as being dynamic and progressive. The other recommends using a smaller image in .GIF or .JPG. with a two line text summary
The above examples are real life examples from my and my colleagues' experiences.
And it's not just graphic designers - I have also experienced marketing people and programmers respond in ways that suggest they see usability as curtailing their professional creativity. Stereotypically, the former wants to use colourful (but potentially ambiguous) language to convey information; the latter wants to showcase the latest 'cool' technology, but which doesn't work on some browsers. The usability specialist evaluates the prototype and grants neither of the wishes.
So is usability destined to be a thorn on the creatives' side? Certainly not. The aim of usability is not about suppressing creativity and originality, but more about knowing the target audience and addressing their needs while simultaneously addressing the client's business needs. Simply put, it's horses for courses.
Therefore, for a website dedicated specifically to web graphic designers I would expect the page to be designed for viewing at 1024 x 768 since almost all web graphic designers will be using at least this resolution instead of the 800 x 600 resolution that is more common with the greater online population. On another site whose primary objective is to service architects I would expect to find technical terminology pertaining to architecture. If another site were to be promotions based, perhaps consisting of a competition, then it is likely (and appropriate) that the copy would be written in 'marketese' style.
Of course, for the majority of websites it's not as clear-cut as these examples. So the question remains: Why is there a greater emphasis on usability in new media (for example the web) compared to other forms of communication such as books, magazines, radio, and so on? I do not presume to know a definitive answer, but I will point out some explanations.
The Web is ubiquitous: a user can access a website without the temporal and physical constraints, especially those of a specialist journal that can only be attained through a subscription or in a library. The individual pages of such a journal, or even of any book, can be considered in the context of the entirety of the publication, in its physical bound entity between the front and back covers, and where quick reference can be made by flipping through the pages.
In contrast, a user can directly access a page within a website via a deep link for example, from a search engine or another site. Unlike the individual page in a book the individual web page must shoulder the responsibility of representing the overall site. A user deep linked into a site needs to be contextualised: the web page must faithfully represent the brand, the business' or the site's reason for being, offer assistance to users, provide orientation and similarly provide access to other areas of the site. Therefore, an individual web page needs to be a self-sufficient entity at the same time as being a congruent part of the overall site (think of a regiment that forms part of a battalion). That this is a significant burden for one screen to shoulder is evidenced by the amount of screen real estate taken up by elements, such as navigation and brand space that are not part of the main body content. According to one analysis by Jakob Nielsen such elements account for 43% of the space on a webpage.
It's a pain looking at a web page
Another fundamental difference between the web and a medium such as television is that the former tends to be task driven and this includes looking for information, whilst the latter is generally for leisure. I won't elaborate on this as it has been widely commented on, other than to state the obvious: tasks require effort and people want to expend as little effort and time as possible, unless it's for pleasure.
This goes to the heart of usability. By definition usability is the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users can achieve tasks (to paraphrase ISO 92411). The need for efficiency and effectiveness is much more important on the web because it can be an uncomfortable medium to interact with:
- Screen resolution: computer screens have a resolution that is 1/4 to 1/8 that of print, making onscreen viewing tiresome. As well, computer monitors generally have refresh rates between 60 and 95 Hertz which again can cause eye strain
- Virtual space: the user's interaction is confined to a 2-Dimensional interface, and which is therefore limited in so many ways compared to a 3-D physical world
- Speed: although Internet connection speeds are improving and a greater user base is now on broadband, it is still not instantaneous. The processing speed of computers is another determinant of response time
These are some of the reasons why usability has such an impact on interface design. Objectives needs to be much more focused and stringently followed mainly because there is more at stake with the Web from bad usability. The currency of usability carries much more weight online and website builders need to be canny with visual design, language and other forms of content. Such an approach is not exclusive of creativity, but it is about how to best meet the carefully identified objectives, and creativity may be one of them rather than a given by-product. I will end with a quote from Mark Twain, who was indeed a very creative individual!
'I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead' - Mark Twain
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