Post edited to correct Ms. Wells’ title.
Interviewer: How would you define “usability,” and why is it important?
“I have no idea how you would define usability.” -Jane Wells, User Experience Designer
See, Jane Wells came from Ball State University — you know all that great software that came out of Ball State, right? — to bring the light of the High Raskin Church of User Interaction Design to the “people just hacking in their basements” who somehow managed to create WordPress, despite lacking access to the Ball State Interaction Lab, and the pliant user dummies used there for crash testing, and the sharks with lasers on their heads that track eyeball focus, and all the other Highly Technical advantages bestowed on the High Priests of the High Raskin Church of User Interaction Design like Ms. Wells. Thank goodness she’s arrived. I don’t know how our customers wrote 30,000+ posts and uploaded terabytes of photos and videos in 4 years on WordPress without her.
If you want to know why Firefox has only two states, “crash” or “allocate more memory, then crash,” this is why. If you want to know why WordPress’s admin panel has grown from “klunky” to “bewildering sin against god and nature,” this is why. Great software is not created by observing users, any more than great architecture is built by interviewing people who live in houses.
Whenever these (invariably self-proclaimed) “interaction experts” get hold of software, the core engine code grows shaggy 5-o’clock shadows of neglect, while the user interface breaks out in a rash of tiny confusing pictures. And Options! Options Everywhere! Customize everything! (So that the “usability experts” don’t have to make any decisions about that ineffable usability.) Do you want a red font or a blue font, monospace or sans-serif, line numbers to left? line wrapping or auto-indent? large or small? would you like fries with that?
What these huckster-hoaxers do is at best called Quality Assurance, and some form of it has a place. The problem is that few of these folks have, in an endless stream of papers and talks and theories and slides over 40 years, contributed a fraction of the clarity of thought about how things should be organized that can be found in a single page of Rob Pike’s The Hideous Name.
For the record, I’ve never labeled myself a Usability Expert, and I was a User Experience Designer before my stint with Ball State’s lab, which was founded as a partnership with the design agency I was with for two years prior, Schematic.
I think you took the “people hacking in basements” out of context here. I give all the credit for the evolution of WordPress to the development team and the end users; I’m just trying to build a better bridge between the two.
@jane wells: That is a fair addition to the record. I labeled you that. No one likes words in their mouth or titles assigned, so I apologize for that, and thank you both for the interview, and the comment.
I really only have one point, layered under a habitual sarcasm above. I’ll try to lay it bare here, so that we’re clear it’s not personal but philosophical: Not one piece of the important, world-changing, perspective-shifting software has been created with the methods of your field. Instead they were written by folks who see this artificial distinction between programmer/user much less clearly than you do, and who simply scratched their own itch. They built great software to solve a problem, not as a survey exercise.
The methods of your field, on the other hand, have to their credit the Microsoft product lineup, the new Firefox UI, and essentially, the high quality of network television, which is “designed” by similar, “survey-says” means. It’s at best a false science with no intellectual foundations, at worst an utter swindle.
Hey, Josh. I saw the feed and thought a new version of sp was out. :-p
I was disappointed last year (or was it this year?) to learn about Mozilla and the Humanized folks. I didn’t know much about Humanized, and I was not biased in any way, but I had just tried one of their programs…
In general I agree with you, especially with the Quality Assurance part. Some of it has definitely its place.
About WordPress, I don’t know what to say. Version 2.7 is improved, with many useful new features, and an interface that is in general better. The only oddity I see is the menu solution. If that is a sign of things to come, then I’m slightly worried. :-) Even in full screen, I have to scroll in order to reach some of the items — this on a display 1200 pixels high.