At some point this is probably going to turn into a longer essay, but I needed to get this written down and put out for comment.
Usability is a process. OK, no surprise there, that’s something a lot of other usability and user experience folks have been saying for a long time. But recent experience has led me to conclude that clients of usability professionals (whether they be internal or external) need to be educated on the process, and the value of the process. Again, that’s no brilliant insight. Most people I know and work with have, at one point or another, expressed the feeling that the final recipient of their work product doesn’t appreciate the finer subleties of the process that went into it.
Lately (say, in the past year or so) usability as a product has gained a lot of traction. I think many people share the credit for this: Jakob Nieslon and the rest of the folks at NN/g have been pounding away at this for decades. Adaptive Path has been doing a lot of work (and writing) that I’m fond of. And a recent spate of essays and articles about the business of usability (and specifically the substantial return on investment that usability can generate) have drawn more non-specialists into the fold. It seems as though people are more “sold” on usability.
But I think this is partly a chimera, because in many cases people seem to be sold on the results of usability (i.e., you will sell more products and make more money), but are less cognizant (or appreciative) of the process that’s required to achieve those results.
The artifacts that usability (or, in my neck of the woods, “user experience) folks create (whether it be user testing, information architecture diagrams, personas, etc.) are enticing. They offer the promise of a better end product – a web site that sells more, a widget that’s easier and more enjoyable to use, a computer that doesn’t trigger fits of frustration and rage. But they are just artifacts, and their creation requires a process. Without that process, the best you can hope for is an artifact that looks like it will help improve the end product, but can’t offer any real guarantee that such will be the case.
Am I just whining that “people don’t appreciate our process”? No one buys process, they buy results. People buy bread, they don’t purchase an artifact of the bread-making process. But there’s some implicit understanding that, unless time is given to letting the yeast ferment and the dough rise, what you’re going to get will be more remeniscent of a hocky puck than an airy loaf of crusty sourdough. People understand the process enough that no one expects to walk into a bakery and say, “give me a fresh-baked loaf of bread with these seven custom ingredients, and I don’t want to wait more than 5 minutes.”
I think that the battle to get usability and user experience the respect that it deserves has resulted in a long-overdue increase in visibility. And that should be well worth the effort. But now, in addition to (or instead of) convincing people that usability is worth the money to get it done, we now need to educate people that it’s also well worth the time it takes to do it right.
