Interface Design Mailingliste: Re: [Interface] Usability

Autor: gui bonsiepe (bonsiepe_at_ds.fh-koeln.de)
Datum: Mit 12 Apr 2000 - 11:40:13 CEST


Guten Tag
hier meine ueberarbeitete Kritik des Usability und Designbegriffs von Jacob Nielsen.
Es geht nicht um die Frage, Programmieren oder nicht, sondern um den meiner Ansicht sehr verengten Designbegriff des Autors, der es ihm nicht erlaubt, relevante Fragen zu stellen.

Gruesse

(Dieser Text ist Teil eines Vortrages ueber Design as Cognitive Tool auf dem Symposium Research+Design des Politecnico di Milano, am 18. Mai)

Usability from a design perspective
Taking the team approach as starting point for the development of digital documents and tools, we can ask how to characterize the professional responsibility of the designer in digital media. Looking at the numerous, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of design and its difference to engineering and sciences, we can perceive a set of basic features or constants. I shall focus on only two. On the one side, we have the concern for the user, and on the other side we have esthetical quality. It is the focus on the user and her/his concerns from an integrative perspective that characterizes the design approach. In that aspect it differs from other disciplines (including ergonomics and cognitive sciences); furthermore a comprehensive design approach does not put aesthetics into quarantine, but explicitly addresses the concern for esthetical quality, including the dimension of play. At this point we enter a conflictive area, because the domain of usability is strongly claimed by well-known representatives of cognitive sciences that deal with web design and carry the banner of usability engineering methods. In order to formulate this exclusive claim on the domain of usability, a rather narrow vision of the world of web design shows up. "There are essentially two basic approaches to design: the artistic ideal of expressing yourself and the engineering ideal of solving a problem for a customer." (5) In this dichotomy between art and engineering, design does not even enter into consideration; it is simply swallowed up by usability engineering. Design is here reduced to the status of a non-entity

We may speculate about the reasons why this has happened. Perhaps it is caused by an understandable and justified reaction against "cool" pages that are user-hostile though aesthetically captivating - the so-called killer sites. But that is hardly an issue, whereas an uncritical interpretation of usability is at stake that takes this complex notion for granted. Usability seems to be what usability engineering methods can measure. No designer would deny the necessity of experimental testing of designs, but an understanding of usability that excludes the aesthetic domain becomes a blind victim of aesthetical choices that occur anyway. By a process of self censorship a constitutive aspect of use and daily experience is excluded. This approach undermines its own relevance and usefulness for assessing web design projects. Concerns for formal quality cannot be disqualified as glitzy stuff and pushed under the carpet only because they are difficult to assess - they probably fall through the rough grid of usability engineering criteria. The claim that "the way you get appropriate design ideas (and not just good ideas for cool designs that nobody can use) is to watch users and see what they like, what they find easy, and where they stumble" (6) is anything but new - it is what designers do anyway in their profession. Furthermore, it does not explain how appropriate innovations in design occur - it is constitutively conservative and anti-dynamic. Having split up the world into two opposite domains - explaining away design - innovative solutions are explained by referring to the deus ex machina in form of "inspiration" and "creativity".

My final criticism is directed towards the unilateral interest in, for instance, the speed of finding an information on a web site, because it overshadows the central issue that web design - and CD-ROM design - serve to communicate and to enhance understanding. Of course, speedy access to information is a desideratum, but speed is not an absolute goal. Effective communication however is. 

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gui bonsiepe
Prof. for Interfacedesign
Design Department - University of Applied Sciences - FH Koeln


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