The death of Usability - long live design and branding
Digital Web Magazine - The End of Usability Culture: By Dirk Knemeyer. The author stirs up the long standing debate about the division between usability and creativity...the comments discuss this opposition as perhaps being too harsh. Read on and please comment...Dirk Knemeyer is a Founding Principal of Involution Studios LLC, a digital innovation firm located in Silicon Valley and Boston. Dirk is responsible for managing the business and for providing design strategy, brand innovation, and training services to organizations around the world.
Dirk is on the Board of Directors for the International Institute for Information Design (IIID) headquartered in Vienna, Austria, as well as the Board of Directors for the AIGA Center for Brand Experience, based in New York City. He is also a member of the Executive Council of the User Experience Network (UXnet). He has published more than 100 articles—many on the topic of design strategy—and regularly gives presentations all around the world.
In the article Knemeyer defines the overemphasis on usability as being the reason for "the largely stale and uninteresting visual and experiential nature of what is on the Web represents the power that usability culture is exerting over the design process"...
Design needs to be brought back in because in his view "Traditional design flies in the face of usability culture."
He considers design to be "largely based on:
Individual intuition and creativity
The designer’s natural ability to synthesize data and information
The designer’s natural ability to produce compelling experiential interfaces and products that provide emotional or informational impact"
To back up his call for "soul" to be allowed to influence web sites design he quotes the following example:
"Anticipating the central importance of design as the lever for competitive advantage, Stanford University is investing in the creation of a pioneering design school. A new trend is beginning, away from the analytical bent of the researcher and toward the creative nature of the designer.
Note the "designer" one page site the d.school / extraordinary / sustainable
Dirk Knemeyer's call to action in "Keep the baby, toss the bathwater" merit careful reading and consideration, he concludes that:
"We need to.. find new heroes. Who are the great digital designers practicing today? There are some, but they remain relatively unknown. They need to step forward, take the initiative, assert their skills and abilities, and take center stage from the researchers, analysts, and academics. And the design community needs to support these people, extolling their virtues with the same vigor we show buying the books and pushing content from our current sacred cows.
Think bigger. With very little innovative work out there, we must push the boundaries of our own minds. Sure, we only have so much screen real estate and resolution to work with. Yes, we are limited by programming and hardware boundaries. We will be awkwardly zagging while most of our peers happily zig in lockstep. That’s how many of the great movements in history got started.
Be courageous. The easiest thing in the world is to line up statistics and best practices and use those “objective” guides as a war hammer to bludgeon away any attempts of creativity, innovation and experiential design. These are the tools of a usability culture and, while they still have a role in the process, they cannot overshadow that vital spark of originality. Flying in the face of these “proofs” is not easy. But, at certain times and in certain ways, we absolutely must.
Learn from the past. Not allowing a usability culture to rule does not mean abandoning it altogether. Good architecture is vital. Having usable pages is critical. Adhering to standards and following conventions is important to a degree. We need to pull, push, stretch and sometimes tear those boundaries, balancing the best of where we are now with the inevitability of the change we will lead next.
The future brand, Totaltravel, can only benefit from balancing usability and standards with a strong dose of soul to create the spirit of travel which will be called.....
posted by Jen @ 12:32 pm
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