01 Mar 2007 0440H

Usability madness

There’s apparently 7 more weeks of election madness, so this thing isn’t done yet, but there’s lots to talk about lately, so I’m just going to go for it.

This week is usability madness. When I was going through usability tests this week, it occurred to me that you could apply Bayes’ theorem to the observations in these tests to infer the conditional probability of outcomes, given the user has done something previously. I’m going to mull this one over a bit more, but the first question is: so you know now that the probability of Y happening given X is n%, so . . . what? Do we now just have another metric we can pass to stakeholders to show we’ve done something substantial?

Jared Spool’s written a piece reflecting learnings from usability testing recently. I’m also skeptical of these wild claims about ROI on usability for UX — “improved the user experience 14,000%! and continues to rise!” — which is a function of click-counting and time to complete. That’s for the beancounters, I know. But numbers don’t tell you much about the story. It’s the analysis of the video, the qualitative analysis, which is not quantifiable, that tells you more about how to fix the usability problems on the site, not the fact that four people failed to accomplish a task. For instance, I was doing analysis recently on a set of observations and the users who matched personas had all mentioned the same word when looking to complete a task. That expectation validates my design assumption, so, in it goes.

I wonder if there really is a thing such as login blindness effect. That is, there is a set of tasks that we perform now that is so common that we don’t even think about them as we go through our business performing them on the web. But as we are performing them we’re not actively thinking about what happens and so things that we put in close proximity in those spaces, such as login, tend to be “invisible” to the user. Kinda like the event horizon of a black hole. We could call it the perceptual or cognitive event horizon. Everything gets sucked in and can’t escape.

Don Norman’s given us a piece of his forthcoming book, The Design of Future Things, co-authored with Alison Wong of IDEO, a PDF entitled, How to Talk to People. Good reading.

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Filed under User Experience, Web

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