Jakob Nielsen: in focus

Is it possible that aiming for perfect usability is misconceived?

"Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen’s business partner, has written a book which tells us that the best ‘user interfaces’ are ones that you don’t even know are there.

If ‘trying to get something done’ becomes effortless, because the thing you are using to get things done ‘just makes it happen’, then the thing you are using to get things done is exhibiting ‘perfect usability’, and the interface (between you and the thing you are trying to do) is, as far as you are concerned, invisible.

Ok, so give me an example of an 'invisible interface'

The interface between mind and body is completely invisible to us for most of the time.

If I need to smile, talk or walk, I don't ask myself how I am going to do these things, I just do them.

Unless I am ill, tired, or in a very emotional or confused state, these things are effortless, at least mentally.

Touch-typing is an example of a 'human/machine interface' which allows an interaction where the proficient user is barely, if at all conscious of the fine details of the interaction at any one moment - it is almost as if the fast touch typist 'just thinks the words' and they miraculously appear on the screen.

Another example of an interface offering 'effortless control' is a 'Jeeves-like butler' who, by dilligent learning of our behavioural tics and tendencies, can decipher and anticipate our needs long before we become aware of them ourselves, allowing the butler to plan such things as culinary delights for us that they know we are not yet in the mood for, but confident (through interpretation of such things as body language in the context of our behavioural history) that we soon will be.

This 'butler-quality-interface' is unquestionably a holy grail of usability.

But as PG Woodhouse, the creator of the Jeeves character knew all too well, even the perfect servant has their limitations.

As far as we are concerned, service that is 'so good that it doesn't require you to describe your requirements' (because they have been deduced from your online or offline behaviour) has important yet underrated and unexplored social implications.

If you want to go to the people who are better at understanding how to design online interfaces that are ‘less obtrusive’ than anyone else’s, then The Nielsen Norman Group is the place to go.

If you want to find out about the latest goings-on in the world of online usability, then Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com website is one of the first places to check out."

Usability and the 'shadow' of convenience

Is it possible that when we have finally dispensed completely with the very last 'inconveniently visible interface', when we have achieved Don Norman’s usability nirvana, there is something precious that we might have somehow managed to unintentionally consign to oblivion?

If you can do everything important that you want to do without even noticing that you’re doing it, is this really heaven?

The end of inconvenience?

Maybe it seems far too early to be worrying about ‘the end of inconvenience’ in a world as full of usability nightmares as we have today, but maybe we shouldn’t wait until our lives are deprived, in a world of ever-more prevalent faceless online consumerism, of reasons to ever actually talk to another human being when we want to buy something or get something done.

As online activity pervades more and more of our daily existence, usability (the science of convenience?) threatens to become the sworn enemy of human experience.

Why?

Convenience = anti-social media

Because things that have the ‘convenient’ virtues of requiring less effort, taking less time and needing less knowledge, skill, or involvement, also have the vices of leaving us all with less and less to do and fewer interactions with people when we do it.

The next big challenge will become the very opposite of that addressed by the usability gods: how to reintroduce the very things that those ‘usability virtues’ are intended to eliminate (like having things to talk about and people to talk to when we do them) and to do so in such a way as to still satisfy our insatiable appetite for convenience.

What happens when usability and convenience hijack the social agenda?

Car insurance companies are currently conducting extremely large scale experiments where drivers can save up to 80% on their insurance premiums by simply putting a GPS tracker in their car which informs the insurer as to whether the driver has been driving in low risk conditions.

The interface for the driver is effortless, the usability is superb, the benefits are proving attractive, the government is interested in adopting the scheme for road pricing, potentially using environmental benefits as the pretext.

Why stop at tracking cars?

Health insurance costs (both public and private) are soaring and unhealthy lifestyle is often blamed.

Why not install RFID tags on everyone to see how often they exercise, whether they smoke, how much they drink and their calorific intake, using these criteria as a fairer way of charging for health services?

The technology to track all these things currently has (you may be disappointed to learn) rotten usability.

But once good usability has become possible (and you would probably need to employ the Nielsen Norman Group to accelerate such a development) would the fact that 'personal tracking' had become 'convenient' (and cheap) be a sufficient and necessary justification for implementing it?

Would we need to pay closer attention to the 'entertainment' values that these 'convenience benefits' would be playing a part in eliminating?

The future of the tracking system (both in-car and on-body) and its usability, looks to us to be a major Social Media issue, because once we have solved the usability/convenience problem for 'health and risk', we may find that we have rendered our own freedom and entertainment 'inconvenient'.

The 'media' part of this issue may not seem to be immediately apparent, but you can be sure that 'user participation' and 'web 2.0 technologies' will appear in just about every personal tracking technology propsal.

I'm beginning to regret that I ever dismissed self expression as a mandatory component of the blog-age phenomena, not because I was necessarily wrong to dismiss self expression as being the defining feature, but because the very technology which delivers 'Social Media' has the potential to do so much harm to our freedom for self-expression.

Nonetheless, being an optimist, I expect a combination of subversive human ingenuity, fallible technology and mischief inspired by boredom to allow self expression to survive even the most insidiously convenient mind-forged manacles that we can devise.

Usability people, when confronted with the undesirable consequences of ‘eliminating perceptible experiences from the usage process’ (which is what ‘invisible interfaces’ are all about) inevitably say something like this:

Reintroducing inconvencience - the entertainment requirement

‘Well, we’ve solved your usability requirement, we’ve eliminated your convenience problem, we’ve freed-up your time.

Sure, this has left you with less to do, but now you’re just complaining about something we technically call ‘boredom’; you need ‘entertainment’ to fix that problem.

We're sorry, but that’s just not our kind of problem, that’s not a usability requirement, it’s a content requirement, we don’t do content, content is subjective, it’s not objectively measurable, we're scientists and engineers, we’re not in the entertainment business, we can't help you with that'.

Social media is inconvenient media?

Shouldn’t Social Media, whatever we might mean by that term, treat this time-honoured ‘answer’ as a call to arms?

Somewhere in this yawning chasm between on the one hand the ‘zero perceptible time, zero perceptible experience’ aims of convenience and on the other hand the experience-intensive phenomenon ruled by 'the more time, human involvement and perceptibility the merrier' mandate of entertainment, it looks as if there is a whole raft of strange, new, and extremely valuable interfaces waiting to be discovered.

And the user interface people are telling us that this is ‘none of their goddamn business’!

Beyond the usability principle - the social media interface

So maybe the Social Media agenda has to answer questions like:

• What does a user experience look like if it gives the user the choice between convenience and entertainment?

• What kind of 'entertainment' could you possibly offer as an alternative to convenience?

• How can that choice be given without unnecessarily compromising usability, safety, liability or trust?

• How would offering such a choice affect the value proposition to the customer?

• Which products and services lend themselves to offering such choices?

• How does the delivery of such options affect the business model?

Too abstract? Here’s a social media thought experiment

What if a product is available in either a free or chargeable form and the difference is determined by whether the product delivers entertainment or convenience?

If you don’t pay for a product but you are delighted to find that it performs perfectly usefully when you start using it, but after a while it starts to behave strangely, maybe in a way which is frustrating, embarrassing, or just makes you laugh, or which makes you have to do things in a particularly inconvenient and perverse way that other people think is silly (which you excuse by proclaiming that you didn't have to pay for it) what is really going on here?

Has the product suddenly become a piece of social media, the content of conversations?

Can anyone work out how you could possibly capitalise on this metamorphosis?