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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