May 14
Usability and Design, neighbors or roommates?
I like the approach UPA is taking to their international conference…
The theme of the conference is “usability and design: cultivating diversity“.
“Usability and design are professional approaches that are often seen separately. Usability is perceived to be focused on establishing standards, rather than a culture of practices to make products and services simpler, easier, and more pleasant to us. Design on the other hand is often connected to creativity and innovation.
This conceptual separation - which this conference sets out to overcome - is reflected in how the consultancy market is composed, how companies organise their staff, and the different professional languages in use.”
Read more at upaeurope2008
Ricardo Salema said on May 18th, 2008
It seems to me that Design and Usability really are not in the same sphere conceptually. Design is something you “do” or even “are” when you practice it and you are a Designer. You cant say the same thing for Usability. It’s a principal one takes into account when being a designer.
For example, as a graphic designer (and lets not limit this to graphic/visual designers, lets expand it to all design including information, product, and experience) when you select a certain typeface to be readable on screen, you do that based on certain factors, one of them being usability. If the user can’t read it, it’s not usable, and your design has failed.
You can expand this out to interaction and experience design. The practice of the principals of usability get more complex as you deal with flows and systems, but they are still framed inside of the practice of Design.
Someone can be a Usability Expert and a Designer, and someone can be a designer who knows about usability.
In the end, Usability determines whether something is usable or useful. Can’t you have a design that is exciting, delightful to behold, and surprising but isn’t useful for anything. Isn’t it still a successful design? Maybe it’s a beautiful tapestry that hangs on a wall, or maybe it’s an animation that just looks beautiful on screen.
If we insist on every design having to be first and foremost useful, we miss out on much of the wonder that creativity, discovery and exploration offers us outside of strict form and function. We should insist that our designs contain fun and life and a certain feeling that is hard to pinpoint, but has more to do with childlike “play” and wonder than anything else.
If you can combine that and usability, then you have something users truly want to use, and even forget they are using because it delights and connects on an emotional level.
Kristen Yerardi said on June 12th, 2008