The Future of Usability is Mobile
The Future of Usability is Mobile is an article I wrote for Apogee.
“People are very accustomed to getting the same information in multiple formats and devices: email, web, print, PDF, mobile phone, TV, radio. Yet this information is not the same in each of these contexts. You can’t click on a link in a radio advertisement. You can’t print out a TV commercial. The exact same information changes due to the context and technology.” (Note: Emphasis added.)
Don’t let the title of the article fool you. While I do make the point that mobile device usability is important and interesting, what’s more important is that we need to undertand the usability of information itself. This is subtle yet profound.
What tools and techniques do you have to test information for usability? Simple proofreading for quality is reasonable but what about usability? What’s the test for usable information? And, not just usable information from the point of view of users, but usable to other services and systems.
This is radical stuff if you start to dig into it. I’ll tell you now that it’s easy to dismiss the usability of information because it seems so simple. But it’s not. If you want to sniff around this idea I suggest you start with the observer effect. You might start to understand that the usability of information is not a single thing but instead it’s a process and a way of thinking.
Well, enough puffery about my ideas. Go read The Future of Usability is Mobile.