A friend pointed me to a whiny screed from one of the normally smart-and-perceptive folks at Adaptive Path.
In “Why Usability Is A Path To Failure“, one Todd Wilkens makes some interesting claims. One suspects he had a bad client day, and just couldn’t take one more client asking whether their design was going to be usable. Here’s what he said:
So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a *different* place in my pants to put them on.
It touched off a poopstorm of comments (which I suspect is one of the other reasons he wrote such an inflammatory post), the best of which comes from Jared Spool:
Todd, I think you have a very narrow notion of what “usability” is…Usability, like all design when done well, becomes invisible. People don’t talk about the positive case. (Well, except for designers who constantly need to bring attention to their work.)
…
Usability is foundational, such as having good content and providing reliable uptime. It’s only *not* a differentiator when everyone has equal amounts of it. If yours is better than everyone else’s, it become a differentiator.
Usability can be measured on a scale of extremely frustrating to extremely delightful. Since different designs competing for the same audience can occupy different locations on the scale, you can differentiate one design from another using it. That’s the broader definition of usability that most of us tend to use.
Props to Jared who very articulately explained why the writer was wrong. Still worth a read to gawk at the mile-long trail of comments.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/17/why-usability-is-a-path-to-failure
