mediajunk

Usability is a big part of my business offering, and is an aspect of web design I've been devoted to and preaching about for years.

A few years back, usability was almost unheard of; today there are thousands of usability consultants out there. While these fellow evangelists have done much to raise standards, I'm still amazed by their lack of focus on clear, concise language.

And for all web designers' concern these days with good navigation; web-safe colours; page widths that fit in windows; etc., many do not put enough thought into the single most important aspect of web design -- language (text) that is easy to understand.

We can't just blame web folk; after all, they pick up poor language-use traits from the offline world. Too many documents -- from insurance forms to competition rules on the back of cereal boxes -- are written in gobbledygook.

Remember: usability begins with plain English or (French, Russian, Chinese, Irish...).

Humanity: Computing's Biggest Problem is a nice little piece in today's ZDNet, which looks at how some of the larger international IT companies are dealing with HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) issues.

While many companies don't take HCI seriously enough, the folks at Intel have pushed the envelope by hiring anthropologists to evaluate how their technologies are used in various cultures.

Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell made the case for leaving the office to do firsthand, in-person research. "You have to go there and hang out," said Bell, who has racked up a fair number of frequent flier miles travelling to homes in India, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and China as part of her study of cultural differences within the emerging middle class in Asia. If she hadn't gone to these places, Bell says that she would never have known that in some areas, people are buried with paper versions of their laptops so they will have technology in the next world, while in other spots, people have monks bless their cell phones. Sometimes, Bell said the findings are disturbing, such as the mobile phone faceplates in Malaysia that show a plane crashing into the World Trade Centre.

I can't decide whether this reinforces or challenges the "global village" paradigm!

Intel are to be admired for taking such a bold step but HCI doesn't have to be sophisticated; you can learn a lot about the usability of your design through testing just a handful of "ordinary" users.

"We don't like to do focus groups," said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products for Google. Instead, Google prefers to first ask employees what they think of potential changes and then throw those alterations out to either a test of customers or, in some cases, just try the change on its live Web site. Sometimes, that's how the company realises that it has a bad idea on its hands. That was the case when it offered broadband customers a thumbnail picture of each Web site with its search results. Of those who got the thumbnails, 5 percent of Google users went to the preferences page and turned off the feature. That's a pretty big thumbs-down, considering that typically only 1 percent or 2 percent of people ever view the Google preferences page.

Ahh ... so that explains where the with-thumbnails version of Google originated.

Marissa Mayer, product manager at Google.com, gave much insight into the company's UI philosophy in a recent talk she gave at Stanford University, entitled "The How and Why of Google UI".

Ms. Mayer has in a previous interview stressed the distinction between "usefulness" and "usability" and made some interesting points about the personlization of ads.

It's nice to see Google representatives speaking so openly about their company and its policies. It would be even better if they started keeping blogs!

For now, Google-watchers must make do with scouring for news on webmaster world (where some Google workers post) and the Google weblog (run by an enthusiast).