I got to thinking the other day that the usability field is now subject to local theories rather than a fully fledged theory of interaction per se. As usability professionals, we will take tools, research, ideas, inspirations from where we will to make the experience good
For instance, we don’t now only use usability labs to get the best picture of what is going on. That might be the best tool, but it might not. We might prefer quantitative data, numbers, to complete our experiment so we’ll choose an online survey. Or we might use eyetracking or analytics. Or both.
Problems with being postmodern come about when the tools are selected because of sexyness or cost rather than whether they can answer the question. I still have problems with understanding why anyone would use eyetracking as a first pass analysis tool as it provides no answers, only more questions. Finding out that a particular area has been fixated upon maybe great to know … but hardly actionable. And from the psychology we know that people can’t introspect at this level.
I’ve started to think that we need to make this more explicit. We don’t ‘only do labs’ and on the Hawdale Associates site we’ve set up some video evidence to show a kind of expert review, also a local theory. I think we need more of this and using YouTube video media makes this even more possible. Even more a stamp of postmodernism, in fact…
RSS Feed
I think you’re right, and I agree that it’s a good thing. We really need to take the message “to the streets” a bit more, and that means getting away from the high-end academic/laboratory side and putting usability principles to work for everyday websites. I could never justify an eye-tracking study for my smaller clients (let alone fMRI and some of the even more outlandish recent stuff); that’s not to say that it doesn’t have value, but they’re much better off with an 80/20 approach. If we can start showing real ROI and start intergrating our work with marketing, search engine optimization, etc., usability is going to get a much better reception from the world at large.
Comment by Dr. Pete — March 19, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
Good point that eyetracking et al does have a place, but not at the start but within a customer experience improvement program.
Most clients want to see a ROI. In fact I realise as I write that that I have never come across a client who does not. Quick wins, real user feedback, obvious stuff - fixes at the checkout probably - is where to start then mix and match pragmatically, postmodern-ly, to get more understanding and more gains.
Comment by David Hawdale — March 20, 2007 @ 1:25 pm