Thanks, Luke for doing this follow-up interview to the Usability 2.0 Event at the WebGuild on April 11, 2007. This is such a huge subject area that I thought it warranted a follow-up one-on-one session.

Q: Although there are established design and usability best practices and standards, there are also varying standards within companies’ definitions of good design and usability and the role design should play in the product development process. Some companies value form as well as function whereas others appear to value function only. Is form still a valuable element in usability?:

A: There are two strongly interconnected ways to utilize form: personality & visual organization.

Personality–or visceral design if you prefer-is defined by the subjective reaction people have when viewing a product. It’s the combination of fonts, colors, images, shapes, and patterns that tells you which laundry detergent is tough on stains and which one provides a delicate touch. Though this aspect of form predominantly enforces a brand message for products it can also have an influence on usability. To substantiate that point, Don Norman has recently exposed research that indicates “attractive things work better”. To quote “When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.” So there’s a corollary between aesthetics and ease of use.

For many people, the role of visual design ends there as they only consider form for “making things pretty”. As a result, they overlook the crucial role of visual organization.

Visual organization. (www.lukew.com/resources/articles/visible_narratives.html) is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a visual design. It’s the process of applying the principles behind perception–how we make sense of what we see- to illuminate relationships between content and actions. Through applications of visual contrast, designers can communicate the steps required to complete a task, the relationships between information, or the hierarchy between interface elements. Since the majority of people are only able to interact with a Web application through its presentation layer, visual organization is a key component for successful interface designs. It essentially tells people how to use things. Personality, on the other hand, tends to focus on why.

Q: In the US, we have a lot of users online and as a result, a key initiative is to drive usage versus users. How does usability play a part in driving usage?

A: Usability is part of a fairly broad set of considerations that determine usage. So we need to think of it’s role in the context of making products and services that are not only usable but accessible, findable, desirable, credible, useful, and more.

Obviously making it clear how to engage with experiences that people consider desirable, credible, or useful is likely to increase usage. So applying usability principles to reduce barriers to engagement is a worthwhile endeavor.

Q: Most companies, including Yahoo, are proliferating their web prescience onto a wap platform in addition to the traditional desktop platform. What are your best practices for Wap usability?

A: I’m going to broaden this to cover designing for mobile devices as I think the discussion goes beyond WAP technology. The basic principles in the mobile space are the same as any medium just very strongly influenced by context. In most cases today that means smaller screens, slow connectivity, challenging input devices (keypad typing for instance), location awareness, and device integration.

Small screens and slow connections require you to rigorously prioritize the content and actions available to mobile users. Large pages with superfluous content are a sure fire way to turn mobile users away from your site. Clear labels and information architectures that don’t go too deep are also good ways to avoid costing users clicks and unnecessary downloads.

Challenging input devices require designers to consider how content and actions can be browsed using keypads–via numerical lists-or simple up/down and left/right actions. Location awareness opens up enormous possibilities for experiences relevant to where you are or who is near you. But this information tends to be regarded as quite personal, so there are privacy issues around how relevant location-aware content gets surfaced to people.

Lastly, device integration is the need to account for a broader product ecosystem. Mobile devices are part of a content relationship between desktop computers, music players, televisions, and more. Getting these devices to interact seamlessly has been a considerable challenge for both engineers and designers.

Q: What are some of your: best practices for usability testing, biggest bangs for your usability dollar, or usability sins?

A: For any type of usability testing, I’d say a crucial best practice is objectivity. Being able to observe what you are seeing people do without a subjective viewpoint is one of the traits I’ve come to admire most in usability professionals. Part of that is being open to new insights. If you have a predetermined point of view, you’re likely to mostly see what you assume you will beforehand.

I’ve always been a fan of RITE (rapid iterative testing) and triangulation (or perhaps a better term is cross-fertilization) of multiple data sources. RITE testing gives you the ability to quickly adapt to issues and opportunities being seen as testing goes on. Data cross-fertilization gives you both qualitative and quantitative information, which paints a fuller picture of what’s working. For example, live site testing may tell you what people are doing on your site but it won’t tell you why. Lab testing, on the other hand may tell you why people may do things but it may not be an accurate predictor of large-scale behavior. When combined, however, these and other techniques can paint a fuller picture.

As far as usability sins, there are a couple scenarios that come up frequently in testing: discoverability and complete cognition. I bring up discoverability because usability testing is often used to evaluate the effectives of specific Web application features and a common finding is that the feature being tested is not discoverable. Most times, I believe that is to be expected. People do not experience features in isolation, they experience them in the context of tasks and goals. As such testing the discoverability of a feature for feature’s sake may lead to make decisions that don’t take the full context of product experience into account.

Complete cognition on the other hand, is the expectation that people need to understand exactly how they accomplished a task. A more relevant measure is how they did or did not accomplish the task they set out to do. Often, it’s unreasonable to assume people will completely understand how and why something works. So considering that a failing of the design doesn’t help address actual usability (usage) issues.

Q: There are a lot of elements that go into a successful site design that are not only about what we see but also more qualitative factors such as how we think and feel as we navigate a site. How do you test such elements?

A: When it comes time to evaluate the more “subjective” aspects of an application, qualitative analysis tends to take over. For example, in a CHI2004 paper, the Microsoft User Experience Team outlined the methods they used to gather “structured user input on the visual design” of a product. These included design mark-up, a semantic design-description task, a statement rating task, a semantic desirability group card sort task, and a modified focus group discussion. Each of these methods relied on qualitative data from participants.

But I’ve always been of the mind that quantitative data may be a more meaningful metric for visual design than qualitative analysis. Judging the effectiveness of visual designs based on what participants accomplish (and how they accomplish it) could potentially allow us to evaluate the subconscious processing of visual information that shapes user behavior. Asking users “do you like option a or option b?” rarely provides any insightful data.

Q: There was recently a Harvard Report titled “Defeating Feature Fatigue“, that talked about consumer sites that load up on features and what they called feature bloat or featuritis. They found that even though consumers know that products with more features are harder to use, they initially choose high-feature models which is good for business initially. But once consumers have actually worked with a product, usability starts to matter more to them than capability. There’re lots of consumer internet plays that are guilty of this. How do you balance the need to be feature rich with usability?

A: There’s certainly an interesting balance between customers and product offerings. As you mentioned, people tend to make their purchasing decisions based on feature quantity but their retention decisions based on actual usage, which of course can be negatively impacted by feature overload.

A similar paradox occurs when the people that love using your product ask for it to do more. After all, there’s an endless pool of user needs to meet. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it also did…?” Companies that pride themselves on listening to their customers are often quick to respond to these requests because they have pressure to continue growing their businesses. But before long the same customers who were asking for new features are the ones complaining about too much complexity resulting from feature overload.

That said, I do think there are ways to balance the need for “feature currency” at the point of sale and product usability. Apple –who is renowned for simple product design- does use feature counts to market their products. OS X Tiger, for example boasted “200+ new features” (www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/). But Apple’s products don’t surface all of these features at once. In fact, some argue that many of their product features are too hidden for average consumers to discover. In many instances, I think that’s ok.

As I mentioned when talking about usability sins earlier, fixating on feature-level discoverability is a recipe for complexity. In many cases, requiring people to exert some effort to access a feature they need is preferable to exposing it to lots of people who don’t need it. The key is to not let individual features overwhelm the larger system. Companies that divide the management of their products by features run the risk of losing sight of the big picture that holds all their features together.

Q: Have we gotten any better at improving the usability of our sites for international users? And, is web 2.0 aiding or impeding site usability for international audiences?

A: From the international studies I’ve seen, good usability tends to function across borders. The same underlying principles of perception govern how we make sense of what we see across cultures and Web conventions are pretty quickly adopted globally. In fact, many times I’ve seen general principles proven to be more successful than specifically localized layouts or interaction designs. That’s said there are a few things to consider when designing global products.

First – and perhaps most obviously - is language. Right to left vs. left to right reading, word lengths –French and Dutch tends to be almost twice as long as English-, labels, specific marketing messages applicable to different cultures and geographic locations, and so on. To give you a sense of how much of an impact language can have on Web design, I had a series on Functioning Form about Japanese Typography online that included letter spacing, presentation, character selection and more (www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111).

Local context also plays an important role. What types of infrastructure exists in a particular geography? Are people primarily accessing the Web from shared Internet Cafes, on mobile phones, or through super fast broadband connections? How do people describe or reference their surroundings and relationships? Do they use train stations to describe locations, street names, or landmarks? Are there cultural metaphors that can be leveraged to

Of these two considerations, most Web companies spend the minimum amount of effort required for language localization and almost no effort on local contextualization when launching global products. I don’t think that’s changed much with the advent of social software and pure online services. So I’d say we have mostly the same issues now.

Q: One shameless self-promotion.

A: I’m currently authoring a book for Rosenfeld Media titled Web Form Design Best Practices that covers Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design culled from live to site analytics, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys. In e-commerce, social software, and Web applications forms play a pivotal role by completing sales, signing up new customers, and enabling content manipulation. Web Form Design Best Practices outlines ways to optimize these key interactions.

You can stay up date on the book’s progress and idea development by subscribing to the RSS feed from the book-in-progress site (www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/).