The future of usability (a 2001 perspective)
Posted in Web by Oscar on August 24th 2008 | Comment?
Back in 2001, I was an avid reader of Create Online along with my peers who were also excited by the possibilities of the web.
Well I came across some of my old copies from 2000 and 2001 and had a quick flick through. Amazingly, I remembered much of the content, especially their Showcase gallery of interesting sites. Reminds me how far we've come since then!
One issue in particular from June 2001 was dealing with website usability, a subject I have a particular interest in today. They were exploring whether usability had a future.
As always with these kind of magazines, much of the discussion was about future direction, developments and trends of the web. Fortunately, when they talk about what the web will look like in 2005, we kind of know now. And when they talk about 2010 - that's only around the corner!
What was particularly interesting about this one feature was how usability was being discussed in the context of bandwidth - we were of course on the cusp widespread broadband access.
For example...
"Will faster download times and richer audio visual content made possible by higher bandwidth render usability gurus such as Nielsen, Don Norman, Brendan Laurel and Bruce Tognazzini redundant? Or will the whole discipline of user centred design adapt to the new environment?"
I can't quite see how more bandwidth (translated as more rich content) would allow good usability principles to be discarded so I'd have to vote for the second scenario.
The first view probably wasn't helped by Jakob Nielsen's opinion that graphics were inherently bad as demonstrated by his own site useit.com that had none. Indeed, who remembers the "Flash: 99% bad" assertion?
Thankfully, usability grew in strength and importance despite the rise of broadband. Today, we talk about usability in it's broadest sense and naturally incorporate the latest technologies in usability testing. In a nutshell, usability when applied to websites is the ease with which users can access content or achieve a particular goal.
However, when I look at the articles in the magazine during that period, they were focused (for understandable reasons) on the arrival of new technologies, whether that was streaming video, more advanced Flash actionscript or other technologies that promised to bring to life websites. As a result some authors lost site of the fact that usability were principles that apply to every aspect of how you engage with a website and were not less important because the technologies were richer.
On one point the article was way ahead of its time when talking about the emerging importance of 'cross platform connectivity':
"As content gets the capacity to flow from PC to the TV to the PDA to the WAP interface, usability experts will begin to face new questions."
As it turned out, this has only become really important in the last couple of years (except in Japan where they're years ahead of us). And do we have to mention the iPhone effect?
Finally, I also spotted this gem in the magazines monthly gadget wish list:
"The (Sony) CMD-M25... has its own miniature speakers for communal listening on the tube."
At £500 this phone was out of reach of most teenagers - if only they new what phone speakers would unleash on all public transport!