Being the People's Voice in Usability Debates

What happens when you get a bunch of people to discuss construction of User Interface (UI) is best depicted by Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think:

This phenomenon is called “Religious Debates.” Someone will inevitably assume the role of The People’s Commissar and affirm that “the people like / don’t like [blah]”. Often times, he is a person the most removed from UI design: biz, marketing, sales, etc. He is usually a person with the most endowed power. (I’m going to refer to the unidentified speaker as “he.” Please address protests to William Safire.)

Someone asked me at a recent geek meet-up whether I thought the new ribbon bar in Office 2007 was a failure because I couldn’t find the right button. That’s an interesting question because there are two of me: a developer and an end-user.

The UI fails me, an end-user, if I can’t figure it out and get it to do what I want.

Business books are full of stories about production disasters. Even after gazillions of dollars of market research, some products still fail miserably (think Ford Edsel).

This is similar to UI design. What I think may very well turn out to be wrong once the UI is beat up by real people in the wild. The best I can do is take an educated guess based on my experience. The better the tools you have under your belt, e.g. eye tracking research, the more educated the guess. The only way to know if you’re on target is to put the UI in front of real users, see how they drive it, go back and fix it, then repeat the cycle.

Feel free to anonymously email this post to the Big Cheese who sabotages your UI design meetings. ;)