The first thing was a fascinating talk I attended at a meeting of UPA North at Manchester University back in November. The talk was given by Alistair Sutcliffe, leader of the HCI group at the university. The talk explained how a number of studies had been done to try and understand how people's reactions to visual design (use of colour, design elements, interactivity, and so on) affect their perceptions of the interfaces.
The studies covered a number of different types of interface – airline websites, teaching sites, university sites. The goals differed from site to site – book a ticket, learn about the planets, choose a school for an internship or a PhD.
The overall conclusion from all this (or at least how I took it, Prof. Sutcliffe would no doubt put it more accurately than I do) is that visual design can be a crucial differentiator between sites. In fact, the more usable sites, (by measuring errors, success in achieving goals, time taken) were perceived as less usable by the participants if their visual design was not as striking or unusual, or if they were less interactive.
(Caveats: Prof. Sutcliffe made it clear that there was more work to do in this area, and that some of the results may have been affected by the young demographic of his test participants. I in no way wish to misrepresent him. While you can quote me, don't quote him from what I've said above - I'm sure if you contact him he'll be happy to set me straight!)
The second thing was an article from November 2004 that I've only just seen. The article is called "The End of Usability Culture", by Dirk Knemeyer. It argues that a focus on usability – in a Jacob Nielsen kind of way – has made the web boring, lacking in creativity, and monochrome. Dirk wants exciting new designers to (cough) push the envelope. The example he gives in his article is bank websites: from a distance, they all look exactly the same.
Now, I think Prof. Sutcliffe's research is really interesting, and it got me thinking: thinking about how good, strong visual design could make a real difference to people's experience of interfaces. I enjoyed Dirk Knemeyer's article too, and I agree that designers should be bold enough to do what they think is right, not just design to "1001 rules for a home page". But I think in both cases there's a fundamental distinction:
- Does the user want to get something done, or are they here for fun?
Coz if they're here for fun, let's give them challenging design, let's give them interactivity, let's give them ways of customising their space and linking with other users. Let's give them mechanisms to explore to random places, controls that they can play with and be delighted by, animations and metaphors.
If they're here to pay their electricity bill, make it boring and plain and standard. Let them do what they want to do quickly, so they can go somewhere else to have fun. Let them not get any errors, let buttons do what they expect them to do, let them not have noticed one thing about the design the whole time they were there.
I'd love to see the test on airline websites done again. I'd like to see the users set the task of really buying ticket, all the way through to payment and arranging ticket delivery. I'd like them to do this boring task once a week for a couple of months. Then I'd like them to be asked – if you had to book an airline ticket every week for the rest of your life, which site would you use? I'll bet a hundred two pounds that they'll have got over the visual design by then, and will take the reliable, error-free, 'usable' website every time.
I'm definitely not saying that we should try to make things that are visually, aesthetically, unpleasant, but I am saying that we should focus our efforts on helping people achieve their goals, whatever those goals might be.
Quite a long, and very interesting, essay by Don Norman on how attractive things work better (which, to be clear, I'm only partly in agreement with).
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