Design vs. Usability: Collaboration not competition
When I contact people at small companies about their website and their obvious need for usability, I frequently hear about the great design team they hired. Then I proceed to ask if they have done or plan to do any usability evaluations on their site, and there is silence. Owners of websites don’t seem to understand the difference between design and usability and why they are both critical functions to getting a really effective website.
I also get calls from recruiters and see lots of advertisements looking for a person who can design, code and then evaluate a website. They expect to find one person who can do it all, perfectly. It’s like being both the writer and editor. It’s like being both a programmer and quality assurance tester. It’s like the fox guarding the henhouse. It just doesn’t work.
Depending on the size of your company and the features on your website, the ‘designers’ may be someone at your company or a friend who knows html and some programming or the webhosting services software and template design or a dedicated website design firm or consultant. Anyone who has a hand in the creation of the interaction is designing the site.
In addition to design if people will interact with your site in a way that is more complicated that browsing for information, finding out about your services and giving you a call, then performing some level of usability evaluation will be useful.
The most comprehensive analogy I have for the complementary nature of Design and Usability is that of Developer/Programmer and Quality Assurance Tester. Just as the writer of the code does not also perform the testing, the person or people who design a website cannot be the same people who evaluate the site to see if it works. It’s just too difficult if not impossible to evaluate your own work. You can’t see the mistakes in spelling or logic, and after a while the only way that makes sense is the way you have designed (coded) it. QA and Usability act as an objective observer to point out issues and recommend solutions which help make the end result so much cleaner.
This is not a competition. It doesn’t have to be a choice between a great design that is creative, exciting and fun but difficult to use on one hand; and one that is boring, bland and dull but gets the job done on the other. A really great team knows that Design and Usability are complementary not antagonistic. Professionals in each field can work together in a respectful way to create something better than either could possibly do on their own.
To further the analogy of coders and Q&A, the development team is not angry at QA when they find problems. They expect there to be problems and hope that they are found. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if the designers said, “You are right we probably don’t have the perfect site yet. Let’s find out what’s important to the users and if the site works for them. Let’s do whatever it takes to make the site easy for our clients to use.”
Suzanne Singman www.usabilityinsights.com (510) 531-1294
May 19, 2009 at 12:40 am
Suzanne,
Agree with you 101%, even the giant Microsoft’s product also lack usability in a big way. I can point to 3-5 major flaws just right out of a File Folder. Then worst of all, their follow on products, one after another, screwed up from one area to the next, and user having to relearn to do the same thing differently.
Intuit Turbo Tax also bothers me the same way. I only use the product once a year. But I have to learn it once every time I use the software. I rather stick to the old BAD way of doing things than learning a GOOD new way every years !!!
But I do admire Intuit, their interface is improving year after year. Can’t they get it right 90% of it and “Stick” with it once and for all? Doing TAX is same old things years after years (except the TAX code changes), why it has to improve and CHANGE every single year!
Stephen Ho