talks about them in design of everyday things. It's this iconic example of failure for thinking about core usability and how our brains interact with the world. You should all probably know this. on the left are Norman doors where the the the affordance that'soffered and the information that's offered does not map to the reality of how people tend to interact with things.
And those changes occur in vision, motor control, speech and hearing, cognition, attention, learning, memory, Usability issues can exclude older people from the benefits of today's digital culture, which
to it and resolve the fire quickly. Now us here in the present we have the benefit many of you have designed knowledge about usability basic human factors knowledge. It seems crazy to us that something so important could depend on a message like this. And of course we also the benefit in hindsight of 2020.
Something that's pulled should look like it should be pulled and something that should be pushed should be flat looks like it should be pushed. Now in the design community and the usability community, user research community, we love making fun of these doors. It shows up again and again on Twitter and Facebook. It's a running joke for us.
verb. Again, if design is a verb, then if you are designing for sale or you're designing for use and usability , you're both doing a kind of design. It's just that the intent and what your goal is or how you evaluate what good is is different. So there's often animosity in organizations between designers and marketers and product managers and the
in a sense um um technology is used for improving um The Experience the usability the accessibility the pleasure um between the user and the product and gosh that's exactly what I do I was I was noticing
If you can do it in person, this is great because it is an excellent way to connect with other experts in the industry. Regularly conduct product usability testing, even when you feel that your product is compliant. And please conduct your product testing with people with disability who use access technology every day.
But until we get the right tooling, we need usability testing. And if you conduct usability testing, you gain tremendous insight from the end user with disability that you can't just glean from the automated testing tool alone. Code according to accessibility standard, and do not code according to a specific type of access
So those are the two programs now. And there are some usability issues around that that we have to make this technology easier for the average consumer.
So I'm going to show you another example of this-- of how the details matter. to send people to usability conference-- even there, most companies are in the red zone.
Similarly, people have trouble discriminating color patches that are small. And so in usability testing here's what we saw.
um another way of saying that is don't um don't surrender um entirely to usability um just for their own for their own ease and and momentary and temporary Comfort um I think that that the opportunity cost for us as a as a
quantifiable data that actually do prod visible progress in how we understand the world, how we uh make you know how we advance usability . Uh and you know and just having this quick tour, brief tour of the campus, you think everything here is about usability . You can actually easily you know it's actually there is a way in which you can
we advance usability . Uh and you know and just having this quick tour, brief tour of the campus, you think everything here is about usability . You can actually easily you know it's actually there is a way in which you can understand empirically what works, what doesn't work, change your tools, change your methods according to that. When it
But I think that a common theme has been not really feeling settled with that contradiction that I'm seeing around me, So it's amazing to see the usability of this.
It doesn't make enough of an impression. Older adults are often not included in usability tests or user research for logistical reasons. And some people just don't think aging is a sexy topic.
that they're working on. So I was like doing usability testing without really knowing it, and in a lot of ways, that experience kind of crystallized
or in the lab. So we have lots of usability labs throughout the campus. We go out on field studies.
And design is not nearly that constrained, you know. And what we're doing in usability is, we're documenting the facts of the world, which is how things really work. And so as an example-- another example-- let's see if I have a pen here.
Because even though I think the big principles are definitely the same, a lot of the smaller details are very different. And the details matter so immensely to usability . It's like people can have a lot of really big picture ideas that they do really right, and if people can't figure out
So I'm going to show you another example of this-- of how the details matter. Because we do know things about usability .
So I'm going to show you another example of this-- of how the details matter. And you can see here-- the usability matrix here.
work. Uh we want the doctor to tell us what's wrong with us. We imagine these things work. Um but the perfect knowledge is not quite the same as usability . Um and the perfect knowledge would actually entail as I list here and of course the list can be longer. You know the identity, the equivalence of the patient and the doctor, the mind and the brain,
So in my example before about this divide between advertising and marketing and user experience design. Well, if you want to convince someone who has the marketing budget to give some of that budget to do better usability studies, you need to know the language of marketing just like an ambassador would. And not just to know it superficially, but to know it inherently and understand that value system so you can participate in it. So there's this notion of design,
um we see frames there where we're taking a P5 and just adding surfaces to make it more Arrow um we're seeing other ones there where we're looking at uh usability of the bottles can we drop them in just like a cup holder in a car um we even looking at uh compliance and whether that's a good thing or a bad
So I want you just for a moment to imagine, put yourself in the shoes of this first customer who shows up, and earlier in the week, you responded to an ad on Craigslist for a usability interview. You've filled out this survey, and you get this email from Michael, and it says, hey, this is going to be in a hotel room, and you're
Jakob is, I think, arguably the world's foremost expert on usability right now. He wrote a book last fall called "Mobile Usability " on mobile usability , and I think there's some copies in the back that-- if you are interested-- some are free, and you can buy them as well, if you'd like.
No, that was not the problem, actually. So I think we have still a lot of things in usability . And that's just going to-- again, for a little bit of history-- show some of the cases where I have taken big companies to task.
I mean, our studies are not big studies. We don't have the budget of Microsoft Usability department, or Amazon Design Group, or anything of that nature. And we find, with very small studies, that these are failed products.
So those are two different ways of thinking about the same problem. So at the time-- in '84-- I'd been to some usability conferences. And there was some research done at IBM.
It doesn't matter what's on the pages. So if you watch someone using a wizard and a usability test, what you'll see is fairly predictable. So basically they read what's on page one, whatever it is.
Similarly, people have trouble discriminating color patches that are small. And of course this is why you get in usability test-- programmers in the back room watching the usability test and saying, what's wrong with you?
costs for IM. Their network effects are way overblown and our customers refused to invite their friends. It was a total deal breaker. We'd have customers come in an in-person usability test. We're paying them to be there. And we'd be like, "OK, download our instant messaging add-on." The customer would be like, “What is that?" "An instant messaging add-on. It interoperates with all your IM." And you gotta picture of a 16- year old like, "What? Is it an IM client?" And we're like, "No, no.
Today we wouldn't dream of building a new service for young people without first conducting foundational user experience research. Or we wouldn't imagine deploying a new feature without first doing usability testing. And I'm really excited to share that, as of today, we have full-time on staff product managers, UX researchers, a UX designer, software engineers, and ML
And it makes me remember that time in the '90s and 2000s when people discovered usability and said, we need some usability on this website.
But older adults encounter them more often. So let me just show you an example of someone who is in a usability test that Kate and I conducted a few years ago.
Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody. Yes, I won't really talk about mobile usability now, because I'm sure all you are working on that anyway. I'll talk more about the past and the future, really-- kind of a combined little set of things there.
are the answer here. And then I want to end with talking about how we get usability more widely applied. Before I do that, I was just going to show you a little video clip of one of-- you know, we do a lot of user testing,
findings and these guidelines and recommendations, it constrains their creative freedom. So is it true that designers are sort of suffering under these nasty usability people? And I would say no.
And so that's really what I'm trying to kind of get through is those issues. And we have a lot of things we have learned over the years about usability . There's also things that are not unchangeable facts.
So this is a photo from the Las Vegas airport. It's very useful, very good usability to have things like that. And those are more universal.
And part of it is kind of technology, and usability , and making it easy for people.
And that is a much, much bigger question that goes beyond just the usability and the interactions that individuals might have with a particular device and whether
which is that in-depth social science research, not the direct usability design interaction kind of stuff.
I mean, I think companies like Google obviously are already doing an amazing job at usability , and that is kind of--
The problem is we never legitimately ask that question because there are actually very good reasons when you think of the wider world and why people build things for why these doors still exist. The usability problems here are not as important to the people who buy these doors as we think they should be. Why?
don't like. It's sort of a joke that we never really take seriously, but I think that's part of our problem in that there's a wider view of who decides to get the money and spend the money in the making of things beyond just usability and aesthetics and trying to delight people. Now, there's
From either perspective, the objective is the same, supreme usability ."
And I'm like, no, you don't want usability .
When you get to AR, there are some studies about usability , about kind of perceptual features.