grokdotcom: Better "usability" isn't always the answer

Howard Kaplan over at grokdotcom has posted a little rant about usability. For example:

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of Usability professionals. The theme of my talk was getting them to raise the bar within their industry; to become true advocates for consumers like they should be. Yes, consumers, not "users". B2B, b2C, self-service, e-commerce, video, web2.0, no matter the focus of your site, or whether a nickel changes hands, your audience consumes the content you provide and engages with the experience you've planned.

And a littler later:

I often challenge people to come up with positive associations with the term user. I'm still waiting for one positive response. Sure, I've heard "Mac user" and even that falls flat given the very real problems with technology — yes, even with Macs — that rear their ugly head at the most inopportune of times.

This is interesting on several levels. First, I find the crusade against the term "user" to be deeply amusing. Howard wants positive associations with the term user? Okay. How about the thousands of times when a usability professional has been in a meeting and said, "We can't do it that way because our users will never figure that out" (or words to that effect). It's an internal industry term that is perfectly useful, and is not in anyway derogatory in the way it is used... quite the opposite. 90% of our job is to treat users with respect... and the other half is to make users happy.

I also find his use of the word "consumer" to be interesting. I would argue that "consumer" is not a synonym for "user". In fact, at IBM we use a term called "consumability", which is not the same as "usability", though there's clear overlap. Consumability is concerned with the front end of user experience. How does a potential customer find out about a product or its features? How easy is it for them to acquire the product? How much does it cost? How easy is it deploy and maintain? How much additional training is needed to be productive? As you'd expect, the is a clear intersection between marketing and user experience in issues of consumability. On the other hand, it's important to remember that in large enterprises the person who chooses to buy a particular product is often not the person who uses the product. Which leads to differences between consumability and usability. For example, price is a good example of something that I would consider critical to consumability but not a factor in usability. Likewise, providing optimizations to increase the productivity of expert users is something that is important to usability but not a factor in consumability.

Later, Howard says:

What brought on this little rant? Our friends across the pond at E-Consultancy came up with a list of their hall of fame "User Experience gurus" based on a survey of their audience. Our esteemed founders, Jeffrey and Bryan, were selected for the list. Flattered as Jeffrey and Bryan were, those who've followed our work over the years know our collective disdain for the casual use of the "guru" label these days.

In case you didn't read Robert's post from last week, where Jeffrey suggests that we marketers need to "get over" ourselves, it should give you some context. A few days later — while, as Jeffrey put it, the woman behind the counter at his local Starbucks still didn't know who he was despite all the publicity – another list came out with an amendment to the E-Consultancy list where both Seth Godin, and Eisenbergs were left off. This new list was created by David Armano, who runs the widely popular Logic + Emotion blog. (If you haven't read David's stuff, his manifesto is what converted me into a regular reader. Although I often disagree with his approach, Logic + Emotion comes highly recommended.)

David's perspective in removing Seth, Jeffrey & Bryan was that they're too much in the marketing camp to be considered "User Experience". My question, though, is this: "Would you prefer to have the experience designed by a top Information Architect but never planned with a deep understanding of the audience's needs? Or would you prefer to plan the experience according to human motivations, then adjust the architecture to match?"

I think you know my answer.

My answer is that it is not an interesting question because both approaches would be broken. I would also say that one of my frustrations is people who think that the "user experience" of a product is the responsibility of the user experience team. It's not. It's everyone's responsibility... including marketing. Just like the "quality" of a product is not the responsibility of the test team. So I fully acknowledge that marketing has a central role in user experience. That doesn't make marketers into user experience professionals though - it's still a different skill set. It's the collaboration between the skill sets (and many others) that creates a good user experience, so trying to figure out which skill set is easiest to drop is not a useful exercise, IMO.

Book review: "Small is the New Big" by Seth Godin

The first question is, why would anyone by a book that is actually a compilation of blog posts? Blog posts that are still available for free online for anyone who wants to read them. To answer that, a little background is in order.

Seth Godin is one of the new marketing gurus of the internet age, and runs an extremely popular blog (aptly titled Seth's Blog), as well as being the author is several books that extol the virtues of permission marketing and innovation. But pigeon-holing Godin as a marketer doesn't really tell the whole story. Godin is part marketer, part guru, part motivational speaker, part pundit, part critic... basically he has a strong belief in his own opinions, loves to share them, and enough people find enough of them to be insightful that an entire Seth Godin cottage industry has sprung up around them.

Since a colleague of mine pointed me to his blog awhile back, I read pretty much everything he posts. What I find most interesting is that I only find value in maybe half of what he says. Another 25% is what I would consider to be "motivational speaker crap". And the other 25% I simply disagree with. But holy cow, there's just so much of it, that even a 50% hit rate produces a lot of quality content. His book is the same way (not surprisingly, since it is from his blog originally). So why did I buy "Small is the New Big"? Basically, it was my way of supporting Seth's blog. It provided me a simple way of reading his archived blog entries in handy book form (for example, I could take it along to the pool during my kid's swim class), but mostly I just felt Godin had earned it.

Fortunately for Godin, I bought it online, because if I had picked the book up and turned it over and read, "you're smarter than they think" in big text at the top of the back cover I probably would not have been able to face the cashier at Barnes and Noble. Outside of Stuart Smalley, that's the kind of motivational speaker crap for which I have a very small tolerance. But here's the thing: I think Godin expects exactly this kind of reaction. In his introduction to the book, he says:

I guarantee you'll find some [blog entries] that don't work for you. But I'm certain that you're smart enough to recognize the stuff you've always wanted to do buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I'm betting that once you're inspired you'll actually make something happen.

Why is Godin convinced that I'm smart enough (and doggone it, people like me)? Apparently because I was smart enough to buy his book. But more importantly, Godin knows that his hit rate isn't 100%. He's fine with that. He's fine with being all over the map. But I'm also guessing that the parts that I like are not the same parts that another person would like. It's about taste, not about being right and wrong. He also hits on another point, and to his credit he's self-aware enough to recognize it - many of his posts say what people already know, but there's value in being reminded of it. Reading the book, I repeatedly had the reaction, "Yeah, that's true, I knew that... I wonder how I can apply that?"

The best thing about Godin is he makes you think. He has a knack for speaking in just enough generality that most of what he says feels applicable to your job, while not being so general that it's not useful. Even he act of disagreeing with him (like my disagreement with most of his riff on website design) is useful because disagreement requires thought. And he's engaging enough that even disagreement feels friendly and personable. I get the feel that I could have lunch with him and we could argue the entire time... and yet we'd both leave the meal having enjoyed ourselves with no hard feelings.

I recommend the book. You won't like all of it, but I bet by the time you finish it you'll feel it was time well spent.