Usability in Everyday Life
Category: Design...
Posted Wednesday, May 19, 2004 at 10:44 AM [GMT-6]

One of my goals in building websites is to create designs that draw attention to themselves only long enough to convince the visitor that the site is credible, and then to fade into the background while helping that visitor quickly accomplish what he or she came to do. A website that does that can be termed "usable."

Usability also applies to many other things in life, and I've become sensitized to those that fall at either end of the usable/non-usable spectrum.

For example, my shower caddy is eminently usable. It's a masterpiece of simple and well thought out design. It's just a piece of molded plastic that hangs from my showerhead, but whoever designed it was in love with the concept of shower caddies and studied how they are used...probably by using it themselves. The soap holder slopes down slightly to ensure good drainage. There's a little loop built in to hold my razor. The shelf that holds the shampoo bottle has a special opening to permit storage with the cap down, to facilitate getting the last bit out of the bottle. Would you have thought of that? I'm not sure I would have, but I appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I see more examples of bad usability design than good.

For example, the headlines that scroll horizontally across the bottom of most major TV news programs are examples of bad design. That approach requires that you catch the beginning of the headline in order to grasp the meaning of the entire sentence. If you fail to look down at the beginning of the scroll, you may have to wait until it comes around again to catch the whole thing...and hope that you're paying attention when that happens.

A much bettter design...a much more usable approach...is the one employed by CNN Headline News, which uses a static two-line "ticker" at the bottom of the screen for each headline. As you glance down from the content on the main part of the screen, you can instantly apprehend the entire headline, without waiting for the scrolling to complete. I also think that this approach works better with the way people actually read. We take in chunks of text, instead of processing a word at a time. The downside is that this is harder on the headline writers, as it forces them to be brief without losing meaning. But, it can be done. Just ask Dawn Eden, headline composer extraordinaire.

Usability isn't just about design, either. Sometimes it's about execution.

A couple of months ago, in a post about random observations ("It's What We Do."), I griped about the way the soft drink stockers at my grocery store stack soft-drink 12-packs so that the carrying "handle" is hidden on the opposite side from the customer. This is annoying and I've wondered if it was being done intentionally.

On Monday, I had a chance to find out. The soft drink distributor rep was restocking the shelves and I asked him. Here's his answer: "It's company policy. We had too much damage to the product when we stacked them the other way."

So, let me get this straight. Either the "handle" (which is really a perforated cutout, designed so you can stick your fingers into the pack to carry it with one hand) is designed so poorly that it was damaging the product when used for its intended purpose. Or, shoppers are so inept that they manage to damage the product by using the handle incorrectly.

I suppose the former might be true, although I've never had a 12-pack come apart at the "handle." The latter also might be true, although my observation is that a lot more damage is being done by shoppers juggling the packs in their attempts to transfer them, sans handles, from shelf to cart.

I suspect the real reason is that it's, well, company policy. Policies are built to address exceptions, and the first report of a malfunctioning 12-pack handle resulted in a company policy to deter future use of 12-pack handles. The actual result? Diminished usability for the shopper; misguided sense of accomplishment for the company.

And that's the lesson for the day: usability requires that the user be given first place. Otherwise, it's either bad design, or art.