Jodi mentioned to me earlier today that although our marketing material is focused on usability, our real focus was not so narrow–or so expert. We have a wide range of skills in the office, and I’m the only one that’s ever focused on usability per se, and even I haven’t done that much in terms of advanced research.

She’s right. Our focus should be on improving the user’s experience, of which usability is a part. An important part, but still only a part. The other primary parts, of course, are usefulness and enjoyableness (pleasure? beauty?), which come from strategic design and visual design, respectively.

Production also has an impact on design.

Other factors in a good user experience come from implementation and production details: is a website competently programmed? Is a package artfully produced? Although these things may not be readily visible to the untrained user, they will have an unconscious impact on the experience (wish I had research to back this assertion up, but I don’t), and they will certainly affect the experience of other user segments (for example, other engineers, in the case of a website).

Besides, the best design (including all three factors above) is worthless if it cannot be created. Therefore, implementation is of paramount value: a solid (not necessarily expert) understanding of implementation constraints and opportunities will allow designers to create amazing, wonderful and (most importantly?) deeply satisfying user experiences. An understanding of the designer’s conception of the user’s experience will allow a producer (printer or engineer) to bring it to fruition effectively and completely.

An abstracted emphasis on overall experience grants designers increased versatility and broader effectiveness.

Regardless of a designer’s specialty — interactive design, architecture, print design, video design or some other area — the designer’s focus must first be on the user’s experience, not on a sub-factor.

Developing this focus as a habit will not only enable the designer to create better, more effective designs, but will also allow the designer to more easily transfer his or her skills into other areas: the person that has to understand a website also has to understand a signage system and also has to deal with a piece of direct mail or read a brochure.

Although these different mediums have different constraints and purposes, the underlying goals of the designer remain the same: to create a design that is useful to a target audience, that the audience finds easy use and understand (usable) and that the audience finds enjoyable and satisfying.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Blog, Design, Being Easy-to-Use. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.