[Sigia-l] MapSurface

[Listera]

Jared M. Spool:

> To assess the usability of a page or site, you need to know two things: (1)
> What the user wants to accomplish and (2) whether they accomplished it or
> not. 

If I read that as it stands, it's not enough.

At the risk of sounding Clintonesque, a couple of issues:

Who gets to define what #1 is? Users? Not always the most reliable way to
unearth intentions. For example, often users will tell you they "want" to
accomplish something, it turns out under further scrutiny that they were
really after something else.

Who gets to define what "accomplishment" is? After all, it should and does
make a difference *how well* they accomplish their intentions, both in terms
of efficiency and satisfaction.

I do a lot of surgery. Often after internal and external teams haven't been
able to solve prevailing "issues". One thing that almost always comes up is
that they give me "usability studies" to show how one aspect of a site/app
accomplished its goal(s) or didn't. And they want to "solve" that problem.

What's almost always missing is other ways of framing the "issue" and thus
the solution. IOW, not just whether the user could accomplish a given task
in, say, 35 seconds, but whether that is in fact what they should be doing
at all. What if the task flow the user is expected to accomplish could be
eliminated to begin with or fundamentally altered? What if there are much
better/more efficient/more satisfying ways of getting from A to C by
eliminating B? 

So "usability" tests for narrowly defined issues/solutions (I'd say the
narrower the better/more reliable), whereas Design removes the shackles on
framing the issue and opens up the range of solutions thus possible.

The ideal, of course, is to combine the two perspectives while designing.
:-)

----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."