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Since nothing else is really going on lately, allow me to ignore my own house rule and rattle on for a little bit about my living. I work in the IT department for a Pennsylvania company that’s literally sitting on billions of dollars. The unit I’m specifically a part of is called Customer Experience and Usability. We use human methodologies and heuristics to deliver user-centered solutions. Really, that’s just an academic way of saying that we try to design websites the right way—with you, the user in mind.

I still have a hard time explaining to technical recruiters exactly what I do. They don’t understand wireframes, task analysis, or contextual inquiries. Thankfully, they don’t have to in order to place me. Usually, saying I do “web design” suffices in most circumstances, but that’s such a 1998 way of putting it.

My next-door neighbor works at the same agency as I do. She answers customer questions at our call center. When a customer has a problem filling out one of our applications online, they give her group a call. Now, the unwritten goal for my group is to make her group obsolete. It’s nothing personal against her. She’s great. In fact, I have a vested interest in trying to get her to baby sit for me and my wife. But there’s a lot to be said about how “usable” an application can possibly be, when the primary fallback mechanism is a 1-800 number that’s probably existed since the mid-80’s.

This concept was made painfully obvious to me recently. I ordered a new MacBook from Apple, which I planned to pay for with an Apple Credit account. After I went through the online account process and received approval for my initial purchase, I accidentally hit a button on my mouse that’s programmed to be a “back” button (a feature I rarely use, so of course my caveman thumb clicked on it). This blew the whole purchase out of whack—the likes of which I’m still sorting out. The details of this fiasco aren’t so important. In actuality, it probably had more to do with a technical issue than a design issue per se, but I quickly identified with the spirit and meaning of what I do.

I try to make things work so you don’t have to.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of cynicism when people started talking about Web 2.0 a year or so ago. Having survived the dot-com bubble by jumping around a few start-ups, I could smell the “marketing buzz” all over the term. But a recent experience has put all that into a new perspective. I was never formally schooled in Information Architecture. But my current work training has validated a lot of what I’ve picked up over the years, working with other industry professionals, and a generous amount of my own intuition. And I really think it’s all going to be good in the end and that it will help the industry move along in a positive direction. AJAX and Flash/Flex will be a big part of this. As the libraries mature and the techniques gain wider recognition and use, web applications should become more and more beautiful and usable.

As someone who’s been trained in the arts, I’m a big believer in emotional impact, even in web applications. The Rich Internet Application of today can deliver on that promise, reaping big benefits to the developers who get it right. Compare Google map to Yahoo’s beta map application. If it were possible to remove the establishment of Google’s brand identity as a provider of simple (meaning minimally graphic) web applications, I believe there would be no comparison between the two. At first blush, Yahoo’s offering looks a whole lot more like they know what they’re doing. To a user that can directly translate into stronger brand awareness and loyalty, a higher likelihood of using the application and/or website, and general warm fuzzies that cause bright little pixel fairies to dance gaily throughout the stratosphere.

It’s not that I’m unimpressed with what Google’s doing. From a technical standpoint, they’re well in the curve. I’m just not convinced yet that I’m statistically insignificant enough to start putting my emotional responses away when it comes to designing a good web application. With so many non-superficial parts to the discipline, there’s an ingrained sense in user-centered design that making an application usable is all that’s needed. I agree that an application should be usable. No argument. But just like in dating, superficial appearances matter. One can be as practical and compatible to another all the way up to infinity, but if the outside appearance doesn’t match up, it can be hard to get a second look.

All of this and more is what I contemplate daily. Since I promised myself I’d stop immediately at the moment of nonsensical rambling, I probably should have ended this like eight paragraphs ago. But I do hope to share more thoughts like this and about my industry in general more often in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 9:58 pm and is filed under design, journal, technology, usability, user experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.