Usability and listening to customers have limits
Gerry McGovern — “Usability sometimes misses the point. If you’re trying to sell me red shoes, I don’t care how user-friendly your website is, I’m just not interested in buying. If you’re charging me 30 percent more than your competitor, all your fancy usability is pretty much irrelevant. If I think this product is cool and I must have it, I will gladly suffer an unusually designed website just to get my hands on it.”
This is a good article in that it provokes a conversation, but Gerry is throwing a red herring at us. Usability is not something you do instead of following good business practices. No experienced usability specialist will tell you to give up an interesting design just for the sake of making something more usable. Usability is no replacement for smart business decisions.
I was doing consulting for a client where I had extremely good data that indicated that they should move their search bar to the upper left part of their home page. My client declined to make the change and made a good business case for leaving the search bar right where it was. I respectfully backed down, looked at the data again, and suggested a compromise that everyone could appreciate.
Just because someone is willing to suffer through a bad web site to get something they want, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it easier. Gerry is trying to bifurcate the issue. He makes it seem like we must choose good design OR usability, excitement OR usability, good business strategy OR usability. Hogwash! This is not an “either-or” issue and it is a shame that Gerry McGovern is using a logical fallacy to drive his point. (For what it is worth, I respect most of Gerry’s articles.)
Read critically, and read between the lines. Don’t allow yourself to just accept what you read without thinking deeper. If you read Gerry’s article without thinking about it, you might think that usability is a bad idea. The truth is that usability is almost always a good idea. (Gerry did a good job finding examples where usability was not a good idea. That’s not easy; bravo!)
I’ll end with an analogy. I could very easily write an article about how good writing doesn’t replace smart business decisions. I could use some examples where good writing, editing, and punctuation, are bad for business. I could show how smart writing is not “cool” and that it gets in the way of innovation. In this way I could easily attack Gerry’s domain: good writing. I could easily use some powerful fallacies to generate all-or-nothing thinking, or I could appeal to authority, or I could make false analogies. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll just emphasize what I said above. Think critically or you will be letting other people think for you. That is a crime you don’t want to commit.
July 5th, 2004 at 4:29 pm
Nice comments, John. Thanks for the link to http://www.fallacyfiles.org
Of course, I’m all for encouraging critical thinking. I only wish that it was applied to the practice and profession of usability (IA, UX, UCD, etc. Pick your favorite name.)
Given that Gerry doesn’t know much about usability, and
that what usability he has been exposed to is inconsistent at best, nonsensical at worst, it’s no surprise that Gerry’s article has questionable information and logic.
I certainly dont know what “usability best practice” is, and no one else does either. Common practice? Most effective practice? Some combination of the two? The problem is talking about “usablility” in general - assuming a common definition, a common practice, common methodologies, and/or a common profession. Those assumptions are wrong. The only current way around them is talking about specific practitioners, methodologies, results, and/or knowledge. Otherwise “usability” is meaningless.