OK, it's a rant about Revolution

Last week, Revolution - a UK 'business and marketing' magazine - published some stuff on usability. Lots of bog-standard usability-lite, a fair amount of waffle, a couple of assaults on reason, and an incredibly unreadable - in the physical sense - article.

A couple of areas that I particularly disagreed with. Paul Dawson tells us what he thinks 'intuitive' means, but he gets himself into a terrible twist. "Intuition is personal to an individual", says Paul, "so what is intuitive to you may not be intuitive to another. So how can there be an objective standard of usability or intuitiveness?"

Presumably what Paul is seeking is justification for abandoning website users to the mercies of rampant creatives. Only kidding ;-). And perhaps what he's talking about is 'intuitable' and 'intuitability'. But anyway, I think intuitive and intuition and both pretty dangerous words, because they mean different things to different people, are massively overused and form the basis of many - false - claims by software vendors. 'Intuitive' is the interaction equivalent of 'nice'. Like 'user friendly'.

What we mean in the context of interaction when we say intuitive/intuitable is perhaps 'uses readily transferred, existing skills', opined Jeff Raskin in a classic Communications of the ACM article. Intuitive/intuitable does not mean that 'everyone' will suddenly be able to use something as if by magic: in the context of human-computer interaction we use it to mean that some people will be able to learn to use something more quickly than otherwise owing to being able to utilise their previous experiences. In other words, we can cut out some of the learning curve because we can transfer knowledge, draw parallels and so on (although we're often not conscious of doing so).

Moreover, we often learn the same things as each other, so there is a certain critical mass of people who have learned a common - or at least overlapping - series of skills and conventions. Think of the alphabet. Think of all the alphabets. Think of holding a pen and writing. Perhaps Paul learned to read and write English using a different set of symbols from the rest of us, and to write with something other than a pen or pencil or crayon. Or keyboard. Dvorak. Perhaps.

Think of road traffic signs. Think of the number pad on telephones, remote controls, calculators [well, actually, there are two different patterns of number pads in Western countries, the telephone and the calculator patterns, and that sometimes confuses]. Think of '+' to increase and '-' to decrease....anything. Think how many different ways windows open in your own country, and then how difficult and frustrating it can sometimes be to try to open windows in a different place with different window systems [in colder countries]. Think of the idea of the volume control (even the ones that go up to '11' ;-)) and similar graduated controls. Compare that to the idea of a rocker switch.

So there may not be an 'objective standard' that 100% of people will comprehend instantly, but there are some pretty useful and widespread ones, which are sometimes culturally determined, and which you dismiss at your peril. Without 'some' conventions, the world becomes a difficult - and sometimes dangerous - place to interact with.

Just imagine if every local council dreamed up its own traffic signs, every airport its own runway markings (well, Milan airport did try something like this) and every supermarket employed a unique set of invented names for its 30,000+ product lines (with no photos). Yes, I do enjoy learning new things, but no, I don't want to occupy every waking moment with learning pointless trivia. I don't even have time to do all the things I really want to do, never mind spend time figuring out what 'creative interpretation' of the shopping basket - or cart - a site designer has dreamed up. One amazing thing, though, is how rapidly we have adopted certain Web conventions: the 'back' button, the basket/cart. Because they are particularly useful?

Anyway, that's enough on that subject. The article then seems to claim that 'user experience' and 'usability' are two opposing and conflicting concepts, before quoting Margaret Manning, chief exec. at agency Reading Room.

Says Margaret: "We did hire a usability expert once, but found they added very little to our process. Unless our creative people understand usability, how can they design sites?"

I don't know whether Margaret employs superhuman all-rounders, able to zip over from a spot of PhotoShop to a spell of cognitive walkthough with a series of users and then back to a little navigation design and taxonomy, before zipping in a spot of project managment over lunch. And then perhaps on to build a little chat room in the afternoon, over a cup of tea and some digestive biscuits. There are different skill sets in the creation of new media products, which is why we have various roles. To be vaguely competent at a few such roles is one thing, and to be applauded; to be good at all of them is highly unusual. It would be great if we all were, but...

It's unclear from her statements whether her - design? - staff in fact carry out usability work - as opposed to following usability principles - but it would seem a little rash not to do so. The point of bringing users into the process is to discover things you don't - and cannot - know about the way people behave when confronted with a particular thing, such as what kind of information different kinds of user groups expect to find, and what they expect it to be called. The larger, more complex your system, and the more varied your potential public, the more of an issue this becomes. Web designers sometimes describe the experience of watching people use their websites as 'humbling'.

The idea of the usability champion is also key, and it's difficult to simultaneously represent the position of designer and the interests of the potential user. I think it's also common for designers and IAs to want to use data from user studies when talking to clients: this moves the agenda away from what the client 'likes' and 'doesn't like', what the designers 'think' may be true or not, and towards what the real public reaction is. In other words, user studies can be powerful tools in the face of unreason.

[Margaret was one of seven web design and usability representatives on the 'Committee of Internet Experts' that recently drafted the 'Quality Framework for UK Government Websites: Usability issues for government websites'.]

There's plenty more in the article, but only if you can read the text of the Revolution article without problems: long lines and masses of words per paragraph (more than 2,000 in the second paragraph, according to Lyle Kantrovitch, posting on Webword) all contribute to a massively unreadable wodge of text. [Thanks to Chris McEvoy for letting me know...]