James Wilding's Weblog

I just read “Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow?” by Jakob Nielsen, and absolutely loved how he focused on the purpose of usability studies: finding out how easy it is for users to do what they want to do.

I’ve actually taken part in a few usability studies — as a participant, rather than a researcher — and what struck me looking back is how the tests focused on finding out whether users could easily do what the researchers wanted them to do. Basically, the researchers would make a list of the things they wanted a user to accomplish — making a booking, finding a contact form, performing a search — and would then test how easy it was for the participants in the test to perform those actions.

This is completely wrong.

What those researchers should have been doing is asking test participants what they wanted to do: usability tests should be framed in terms of “what do you want to do here”, not “how easily can you do what we want you to do here”. This makes tests much more open ended, but in the businesses in the real world don’t decide how people use their websites, and that sort of decision shouldn’t be made in usability tests either. Let the users decide; let the design follow.

Every so often, I read about how the internet is massively changing the way businesses and customers interact. Today I read a Guardian book review that explained how

“Networked markets are beginning to self-organise [...] People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.”

A lot of people think that the internet creates new forms of customer behaviour. I disagree: I think the internet primarily gives more emphasis to existing forms of behaviour.

Anyone who’s ever worked with small businesses will know that word of mouth is extremely important, and that customers will naturally organise themselves into ad-hoc groups which support individuals and offer a way for newcomers to get information on what the Guardian calls “vendors”.

If that sounds too theoretical, think about restaurants. You probably know a few friends who can offer restauarant reviews or suggest a new place to eat — even explain wine lingo if you’re new to that side of things. There’s your self-organising community: all the information and support you need.

Here’s the important point: you don’t have to go online for any of this. These customer communities have existed for hundreds of years: do we really believe that before the world went online, everyone just called up their local restaurant and said, “Hi. Are you good at cooking?”…?

The power of the internet is that it supports and encourages these communities, and in some cases makes them possible where they wouldn’t have been before. But the communties themselves aren’t new phenomena: there’s no magic here, just progress — old things appearing in new ways.

We really should be cautious about claims that the internet is changing the basic nature of business: it’s not. What’s happening is closer to evolution than revolution, and those who tell you otherwise are probably trying to sell books.