On the eve of this weekend’s UX Barcamp, I thought I’d share a few thoughts I have about the future of ‘usability’ – or perhaps more specifically, the future of the ‘usability practitioner’.

For the best part of a decade, I’ve been involved in New Zealand’s ‘usability’ community. I still recall enjoying a beer with Sam and Trent a few days before they set up their successful usability consultancy, Optimal Usability. They were true pioneers, bravely knocking on doors and convincing people to give this ‘usability’ thing a go. And their hard slog paid off – their client list is an impressive who’s who of New Zealand businesses with significant online presences. It’s hard to meet anyone in the industry who hasn’t worked with them, or know someone who has. They deserve most of the credit for putting ‘usability’ on the New Zealand map.

Shift is another stalwart – one of New Zealand’s most established specialist ‘online’ agencies. Various friends and colleagues have spent some of their careers at Shift, and they have often reflected positively on Shift’s early integration of usability practitioners into its team.

There are many other people I could mention; all of whom have been instrumental in establishing and growing New Zealand’s usability community and, perhaps more importantly, the demand for usability services.

The barcamp’s attendee list is a pretty good list of the key people and companies who make up the New Zealand usability community today.

For my sins, I set up a small consulting company called Hansel in 2001. Over the years, we did our share of usability projects, but we soon came to realise that (good) usability was just one part of a greater whole . . and that companies actually wanted the ‘whole’: good product, service and/or business itself. A little book called “The Inmates Are Running The Asylum” was the catalyst for adopting the philosophy and practice of Goal-Directed Design™, and Hansel became known for its expertise in interaction design.

Hansel merged with DNA in May 2007, and since that time it has been a privilege to work with Gren, Ben, Darryl and the team to inculcate ‘usability’ and user-centred design into DNA’s process and upskill our designers. I’m proud of our capabilities in the area of digital product design, and the amazing projects we’ve delivered of late.

My background and experience have led me to the following conclusions:

• Usability testing is a way to gather insights about the quality of the experience someone has with something. It is not a substitute for proper planning and up-front research (users, domain etc.). It is also not user-centred design in and of itself.
• Experiences are the results of people interacting with ‘things’ (and other people). You can only really ‘design’ the experience by designing the thing/s people interact with.
• Usability is not design; it is an attribute of design. Generally, if something has poor usability, it is a bad design. In my experience, talking about ‘design’ rather than simply ‘usability’ problems is better because (1) it suggests that more and/or the right people need to be engaged to solve the problems; and (2) it reminds everyone to adopt a more holistic view. Jared Spool’s 2006 blog post about this was – in my opinion – spot on.
• There is usually a vast chasm between discovering a usability problem (e.g. “overall, most users failed to achieve task x”) and coming up with a design solution that will solve this problem without causing others. This chasm is usually wider and harder to bridge if the person who discovered the problem was not part of designing the solution from the outset, and/or won’t be responsible for designing the solution moving forward.
• The term ‘UX designer’ seems to have been borne out of a desire for usability practitioners to say they are doing more than just usability testing, but not wanting to say they are designers in the traditional (user interface, visual etc.) sense. The problem here is that many ‘UX designers’ are not so good at the other aspects of design (beyond mere usability and IA), yet they often take the lead role in shaping the solution.
• In so far as we want to distinguish between someone who designs furniture from someone who designs digital products (although the chasm between these two disciplines is getting increasingly narrower ), I am comfortable with terms like “digital product designer”, “user interface designer”, or simply “online designer”. But for simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to refer to “designer” for the remainder of this post.
• Designers – not usability practitioners – are the future. By designers, I mean people who can completely ‘design’ a digital product; from research to framework/information architecture/concept to launch. This means that usability practitioners had better get good at ‘design’ (well, all of the other aspects of it including such ‘trivial’ things as colour and typography) or designers better get good at ‘usability’. From experience, the latter is a much easier transition, with greater likelihood of producing a great practitioner you’d want to have on your team.
• There may be a role for ’specialist’ usability practitioners in large teams, to complement the core design team (facilitating usability tests etc.) but large teams are not the norm in New Zealand and many other places around the world.

I look forward to discussing these conclusions with barcamp attendees this weekend and, of course, on this blog. What do you think about the future of ‘usability’?