Its good to see a bit of design that uses its own form to lead its users to do the right thing. That makes real good design, but requires a truly holistic view that we should, as designers, be aspiring to.

In this case, it is a requirement on this Virgin Trains loo that the seat be down when its flushed. (I’m not sure what the consequences would be if it were not, but I am sure that I’d rather not be there!). So how does the design assure that? In this case by hiding a control so that when the control is visible and able to be used, the artifact is in a state when it can be used. In straight terms, the flush button is behind the seat. So, you got to put the seat down to flush.

This use of the form to define the use has an unfortunate side effect, though. It means that the flush button has to be signposted as it is not immediately visible. Unfortunate, or consequential? Whatever, the seat being down would have to be mandated in some way, I guess a less farsighted designer might just put up a sign stating the fact, but this would be poor and would not 100% determine the final state of the loo, so I can live with it as consequential.

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I think there is great value in swapping ideas with your peers and collegues within and without your area of expertise. So I tried to find a network in Manchester to get involved with (there were a few a few years ago I remember) but to no avail.

But with a bit of help from Louise from the UK UPA I got reacquainted with my old friend and ex-collegue Andy Swartz from Serco Usability Services and we are going to set up a Northern Chapter of the UPA, first meeting planned for late/end November.

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Sometimes you come across something so poor, you just can’t believe someone who calls themselves a designer could ever manage to not think past the pixel.

Take a look at the scrolling area on the right of the screen here. You see the curved piece of design bottom right? It obscures the text so you can only read about three lines at a time before having to scroll again, just three lines. And again, just three lines (ad infiitum).

Perhaps Jakob is right, we should be stil focussing on usability, perhaps the web world just isn’t ready for the next step into experience design. Certainly, to design good experiences you got to have the basic usability in place, or you get a mess like this.

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I saw this phrase used in one of the sunday glossies and I loved the way that it sounded and felt. Its a wake-up call to the all-too-serious logical usability types who have been trying a bit too hard to make a machine of the web rather than a communicating entity.

And yes of course the systems we design have to work right and support the users tasks but if the result is efficient but dull and boring then have we really designed something good?

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Its interesting to think, as I did the other day when presenting at IMRG how a successful idea can drive you off track. Incrementally, the development of this idea doesn’t break your model of the world, but after 10 years you may find yourself in a very different place and with a very different mindset than when you started.

I was presenting about Usability and the Web Customer Experience. Up until recently I had considered my concept of usability to be broad … effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction … the ISO standard usability (good job, Nigel Bevan). Its a good definition, not too hard nosed, as it includes the ’satisfaction’ measure, and I used it consistantly at Zendor when I developed Usability led Design. But I have moved on as I have set up Hawdale Associates into taking a wholly Customer Experience view, away from but inclusive of usability. How did it come to this?

How? Bloody Jakob Nielsen that how. Lets think back to my formative years and some favourite reads. First out of the bag, the Don himself.

Don Norman wrote ?User-Centred System Design? in 1984 when usability was HCI, and the issues were perceived as those around the understanding of systems and communication of instruction and as HCI folk that was our remit. We took a heavyweight principled user view. The stuff that Norman was writing about was based on Participatory Design originally out of Scandinavia in the 70’s. Hard socialist stuff. Users partipate in design, design is good, work is fun. Big user focus, all centred around the user.

Around the same time, Brenda Laurel’s ?Computers as Theatre? coined the term ?User Experience? and stressed narrative, context and psychological flow. And this is when software was NOT the web! A golden era was being unveiled about how it would be when the ‘user interface’ was transparent and precisely revealed the system model.

But the book that really made a difference was Jakob Neilsen’s ?Usability Engineering? in 93 which established the term ?usability? and put it hard in the mainstream. At the time we all read the book, gasped at the risky guerilla tactics and realised that if we did HCI in this way then people would listen to us (as they didn’t before this, however worthy we were!). And, consequently, we all made sites and software on hell of a lot better and easier to use. So whatever we think of him, Nielsen made a big splash.

But alongside all of that, the major plot line about communication, flow, narrative, psychology and customer centricity heralded by Norman and Laurel got lost in Nielsen’s rather gray view of the world. I’m fed up of being tarred by Nielsens 1001 guidelines brush, he’s a ‘distinguished engineer’, I’m a psychologist in HCI. Lets get back to Norman and Laurel (and Landauer and Cooper and now Pine and Gilmore) and better deliver a good online experience by getting back centred on the CUSTOMER and leave Nielsens one-size-fits-all 1001 guidelines behind.

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