Interview with Paul Veugen, founder of the remote usability testing tool Usabilla

Paul Veugen is a fresh out of university entrepreneur and founder of the remote automated usability testing tool Usabilla.

Customers of Usabilla include some pretty big names like; The Discovery Channel, HowStuffWorks, Thomas Cook and the World Wildlife Fund, just to name a few.

Paul is a rare and gifted person; he’s a young and successful start-up founder and business person, he’s trained in Communications and Digital Media, and he’s a knowledgeable practitioner of usability and user experience.  Studying Paul and learning about what he thinks is the next Big thing could be very useful information for anyone interested in the future of usability and UX.

Paul Veugen

Q1. What’s your background? Where did you go to school, what subjects interested you?

My background is in Communication sciences. I studied Corporate Communication & Digital Media at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and graduated just recently. I really enjoyed my time at Tilburg University and spent most of my time working, race-rowing, (including acting as the race-rowing Board member), and even some studying!  I definitely learned the most about working for and with various people (clients) while running a large rowing club for a year as President of the board.

At the age of 15 I started working for a local web design firm, mainly focusing on design for SME’s in the southern part of Holland. I’ve worked for this company for almost ten years and choose my studies based on my early working experiences.

It didn’t take very long before I got a more leading role in the company and specialized more and more in strategy, user experience, and social media.  The more I learned by practice, the more interested I became in research about entrepreneurship, user experience and usability.  That’s when the business ideas for a new type of usability business started popping up in my head, and became more and more frequent.

Q2. How did you get into the usability field?

I started working as web designer at an early age and learned to design with the client and client’s customer in mind. When I just started I was spending most of my time on various tutorial sites to work on my technical skills in Photoshop and Illustrator.  I quickly discovered that to successfully design a webpage you don’t need all the eye candy in Photoshop. With some very basic technical skills, for example using Photoshop or Illustrator, anyone could in theory design a webpage.

However, building beautiful and easy-to-use websites is completely in a different league.

When I realized my creativity and technical skills were not the most important limiting factor to a successful user experience, I started to focus more on topics like interaction design, usability, and user experience. I really enjoyed scanning and reading hundreds of blog posts a week on these and other interesting topics.

Q3. What is it about usability that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

Good usability is so complex and simple at the same time.

I prefer to put usability in the bigger picture of user experience. I think usability is a more technical approach, where user experience expands the scope with aesthetics and attitude. If you only focus on usability and basic task performance, you could probably just simply build black and white, functional webpages with blue underlined text links.

I like the more complex relationships between desirability, usability, accessibility, value, credibility, and findability.

User Experience

Q4. You founded the online usability testing tool Usabilla.  What is Usabilla and why should someone use it?

Usabilla

Usabilla is a simple tool to collect valuable real-user feedback on any sketch, mockup, website, or image.

Participants perform simple tasks on your webpage or concept and can add points and notes. For example, You can ask participants;

“Click on the things that are the most important for you” or “Where would you click to find information about rates?”

Participants can answer these tasks by clicking anywhere on the screen to add a point and can add notes (‘Post-its’) to leave additional feedback.

You can use our tool to set up task orientated tests (example, “Where do you click if you’re interested in usability resources?”) and to collect feedback (example, “What’s important on this page and why?”).  You can then analyze the test results with plots, heatmaps, and time per task.

Usabilla provides a really simple way to collect feedback from large numbers of users and can be used in any stage of the design process to test task performance.

Q5. As founder of Usabilla, what was your motivation for creating this tool – why did you believe Usabilla was needed?

Usability research is booming. There’s a large group of innovators and experts sharing their ideas and knowledge about testing.

In the past 15 years academic researchers wrote hundreds of interesting papers on usability testing and the pros and cons of different testing methods. There are many verified testing methods available, but most of us only focus on (lab based) best practices from just a handful of experts.

At the university I searched for a quick and dirty method to test my mockups. That’s when I first found out about the Plus-minus method for document evaluation. The idea for Usabilla is based on this method.

The Plus-minus method is a simple yet effective tool to collect feedback on a document. You ask participants to draw pluses and minuses on the document for the things they like and / or dislike. Afterwards you ask your participants why they added a plus or a minus. About ten years ago a researcher made a first attempt to adapt this method to the screen in a lab setting. We’ve used the method and translated it to a flexible remote tool.

We try to make it as simple as possible to test your (early) ideas, without slowing down your development cycles.

Most of our clients are usability experts, designers & developers, and online companies who made Usabilla part of their usability toolbox and combine our data with other tools to create a more complete picture of their users.

Q6. Usabilla is now out of Beta and a full-fledged paid service.  What were some of the key learnings from your Beta days you believe made a difference to your current success?

We launched a first beta release of Usabilla less than a year ago (2009). Our first version was buggy, but it clearly showed our ideas about usability testing and what we were aiming at. We received very interesting Beta user feedback. This feedback and interesting use cases helped us to improve our product and fine-tune our ideas.

We received great suggestions for interesting tasks to use in a test.  Using this feedback, we implemented new features, improved our test interface bit by bit, and made our platform scalable.

Our early Beta users turned out to be great ambassadors of our product. Our Beta period helped us to proof our concept and gain traction in the marketplace with their word of mouth and advocacy.

We’ve removed the Beta label by the end of December 2009 and launched our paid plans at the same time.  This was just a formality.  The months before our public launch we were already running interesting cases from a variety of users. Once we were (almost) sure that everything worked as planned and our service could deliver real value, we kicked off the public release.

We’re now still developing at the same pace. We try to push out new releases every two weeks. Many of the features and improvements we’re working on are based on the input of our users. Practice what you preach!

Q7. What advice do you have for other start-ups that wish to create an online service, whether usability related or otherwise?

I often meet other entrepreneurs working on what they call an exciting new business concept, who are afraid to share their genius idea with others. They spent months in their home offices with closed curtains and disconnected laptop to build their awesome concept into a wonderful company at least 1% of the world is craving for.

Only a few true geniuses are able to build a company like this, who have the network to plug their product or service.  Everybody else is probably more likely to succeed if they start an open conversation and not hide their ideas.

Developing a company is about iteration.  Trial and error.  Listening to the eco-system you’re trying to become part of.

There’s a striking parallel between building a company and designing a website.  Sure, some of us can close our eyes and ears and build a great website, but most of us could benefit greatly from a conversation with our potential users. A conversation helps you to understand your user and can give meaning to behavior. Building a company or a website is a combination of your vision and goals PLUS valuable input (both attitude and behavior) from your users.

Q8. What’s in the future for Usabilla, what changes or improvements are you working on?

We’re going to expand our development team and make an exciting roadmap for the upcoming months.  Besides general improvements in the flow of our back-end we’re currently working on an API.  This API allows you to retrieve all your test data and use it for example to create custom reports in Google Spreadsheets or import it into other usability tools.

The first version of our API will be ready by the end of April 2009. That’s just the beginning.

We plan to integrate Usabilla in large content management systems and combine our tests with other usability tools. Other features that have our attention at the moment are improving reports, testing user flows, and small performance improvements.

Q9. What do you think the next year to two years will bring for remote usability testing?  Do you see it growing, if so by how much?

In 2009 a large number of remote usability testing services popped up. It’s interesting to see how these services all take their own approach to usability testing.

In my opinion there is no such thing as THE usability test. We’re data junkies combining multiple sources to learn from our users.

I expect an enormous growth of the entire usability market and remote research in particular. Innovators like the guys from Bolt|Peters (read their book ‘Remote Research‘ or get it with your Usabilla account) are paving the way and sharing their best practices with the world.

Usabilla currently works with researchers, designers and marketeers. They all share the same hunger for information to learn, improve, and optimize.  Usability and user experience is hot.

I expect that remote usability research is going to show the same sort of growth as the analytics market showed a few years ago. Everybody can use Google Analytics and dive into the data to learn some basics about visitors. Remote testing services are the new analytics, providing additional insights in the behavior and/or attitude of users. These tools could be used by everyone for basic information, and become powerful new data sources for the usability professional.

Q10. What’s next for you and your career in the next year or two, what would you like to focus on?

Every morning I wake up full of energy.  I get really excited by working on Usabilla.

My focus for the upcoming two years will be Usabilla.  I want to spent my time building something that provides value to our users and their customers. I want to expand our eco-system. One of the most stimulating things for me is meeting new people, both online and face-to-face, and learning from them on a daily basis.

I plan to attend some great events in Europe (be sure to check out UX-LX in Portugal) and the U.S. in the upcoming months to meet people and share ideas on usability & user experience. And you can always feel free to connect with me (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN) if you would like to share your ideas about user experience, usability, and business.

Thank you Paul!

For more information about Usabilla, or to try the service out, be sure to check out their free test.

Interview with Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Founder of World Usability Day

Elizabeth Rosenzweig is the driving force and founder of the Usability Professional’s Association World Usability Day, a day that seeks to recognize and promote usability as a means to making services and products easier to access and simpler to use.  The World Usability Day or “WUD” for short takes place on the 2nd Thursday of the month of November.

Elizabeth Rosenzweig

In her “spare” time,  Elizabeth leads the Bubble Mountain user experience consulting firm and is also an author, a multi-patent holder and mom.

Q1. What’s your background? Where did you go to school, what subjects interested you?

My background is in art and photography. I studied photography and fine arts at Goddard College in Vermont and worked as a freelance photography and graphic designer Fellowship for a few years when I graduated. I had a Fellowship at the Sun Valley Center for Arts and Humanities before returning to Vermont to go the freelance work.

I finally decided to go to graduate school and ended up at the Visible Language Workshop (WLW), The Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I loved art, art history, sociology, psychology, english and poetry. I studied graphic design and then computer graphics at MIT.

In undergraduate school I was trained to take machines apart and put them back together. I remember once when a printing press didn’t work, we, my peers, took it apart to see what was wrong.

It took us a while to diagnose the problem and put the press back together, but it taught me a valuable lesson-that a machine is only a machine and that people are the one who make a machine work.

In graduate school I learned to work with digital technology and found that made me feel that we, people and users of machines, had even more control then we thought. By using a programming language to talk to a machine, I found that I could control the machine in ways I had never imagined. This was a real paradigm shift for me.

Q2. How did you get into the usability field?

Actually ,it was a bit accidental. I was studying computer graphics at MIT in 1985 and realized that no-one was doing advocacy for users. Then I started to do programming when I got out of graduate school and did a bit of design when I started putting users in front of the applications I was working on.

I heard people saying that they felt stupid when they saw a computer, and that struck me as wrong. How can a machine make a person feel stupid? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.

Since my background is in photography and printmaking, I had a lot of experience with different types of machines and was comfortable working with them. I found myself getting outraged that people would get so intimidated by a machine and I wanted to change that.

I started by creating a system for photographers and artists. At the VLW we had a system that allowed users to create amazing imagery. It was called “Sys” and was a precursor to Photoshop.

Sys was better then photoshop because it had evolved over the years by students using it, creating new functionality and iterating. Sys ran on a minicomputer and the output was either slides or a Polaroid large format printer.

Sys really opened my eyes to the capabilities of digital imagery but it was very hard to use. I decided that my thesis would be to create an easier system for users so they could access the power of the computer.

Once I graduated I started to work as a Graphic Design specialist. In those days, 1985, there was not really a field of user-centered design but many of us were doing those jobs.

I took the developers on my team out into the field to watch users do their jobs and then we would all go back and figure out how to design a system that was easy for those users to work. Over the years SIGCHI and then UPA developed and I was happy to have a peer group.

Q3. What is it about usability that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

I find it meaningful when I can make a difference. I enjoy helping people overcome their fear of technology and making them feel more powerful in terms of their use of tools. I enjoy developing tools and systems that help people do what they need and want to do, in a fun and easy way.

It is especially rewarding to work in a field that is making a difference, such as one of recent projects for National Science Foundation (NSF).

This is the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), the largest project I ever worked on, whose goal is to pull together data from several fields, including oceanography, Nasa satellite and land seismic networks to create a cyberinfrastructure.

This was exciting because one of the goals was to create an easy to use system that would allow anyone to view data about the earth. The team started with eliciting user requirements from stakeholders and users. It was exciting to be part of a team that was walking the walk and talking the talk about user centered design.

Q4. You founded World Usability Day, why did you feel Usability needed a “day?”

I wanted to raise awareness about the problems of technology products and services so that the average citizen would know that they don’t have to make do with things that don’t work.

I wanted stop people from looking at machines and feeling stupid. I also wanted to bring the profession to parts of the world that had never heard of it before.

It is interesting to see that raising awareness is a slow process but spreading the profession is happening faster then I anticipated.

World Usability Day is a big part of the new success the field of user centered design has enjoyed in countries like India, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Romania, Peru, Philippines, Canary Islands, Iceland and many others.

In addition World Usability Day has helped to solidify the field in many parts of Europe and Australia.

Q5. World Usability Day is on the second Thursday of November, why that day, is there significance to it?

We tried very hard to find a day that would work all around the world. We wanted to balance all the conferences that took place in the spring and summer, as well as major vacation times. We tried to avoid major holidays like Christmas, Easter, Jewish High Holidays, Ramadan, and other important days such as major elections, bank holidays, etc.

We did a survey for all the volunteers and found only a few days that worked for everyone. It turns out that some holidays run on a lunar calendar and therefore move the dates. We tried to give a lot of leeway for those and came up with the current date.

Q6. In the past, some high-profile personalities in the usability industry have claimed that the World Usability Day charter and world usability day itself are irrelevant. How do you respond to people who maintain the charter is overkill, or that every day should be usability day and no specific day is needed?

I have talked with a few of them, and while some high profile personalities will always want to create controversy a few have changed their initial position.

I know of at least one very high profile personality who now sees that having a day for people to focus on the importance of user-centered design has opened up the field in places like India and many other countries.

He has said that the value of this message and raising awareness is very good for the field in general, and of course, for some countries specifically.

Q7. World Usability Day has been expanding greatly, you now have at least 43 Countries participating in World Usability Day events, why do you think there’s been such an increase in interest in usability?

The timing is right and people see that they don’t have to put up with products and services that don’t work right. People like to get together and they like structure.

World Usability Day has created a structure that allows people to share ideas, and plan regular events around important themes in user centered design.

In addition, World Usability Day has been able to go beyond any one organization to pull people together for something greater than themselves or their local group.

Also, we have provided a great and workable infrastructure for organizers to stay involved each year and build on their past work.

Q8. Your firm, Bubble Mountain Consulting, provides a pretty broad array of user centered design services. What are most of your clients asking for these days, what (if any) are the trends in existing or new service requests you are seeing?

In the past two years I have had many requests for contextual inquiry, persona and use case development and writing of user requirements.

There is always work in doing website design and redesign. I find that design is a staple of my practice, but I enjoy the full process.

I think the trend to really understanding the user is getting momentum and that is exciting, since that is where our profession can make a difference.

Prior to that I had been doing more innovation and invention, which is a lot of fun.

I think with the economy going down the work has gotten more concrete and specific around product revision and smaller applications.

Q9. What’s next for you? What are your looking forward to accomplishing in the future?

I want to get World Usability Day on the calendar of the United Nations.

If you look at the calendar of the UN you can see many dates such as World Book and Copyright Day, World Intellectual Property Day and World Television Day, in addition to all the humanitarian commemorations.

The value of getting recognized by the United Nations is more visibility and connection to other important events in the world. I think this would help us make the impact we are looking for.

If anyone wants to be a part of that, there are a few ways to help. The first is to go to World Usability Day and sign our charter.

The second way to help is to contact me and work with our committee to organize UN Ambassadors to sponsor our petition.

Thank you Elizabeth Rosenzweig!

To learn how you can participate in World Usability Day visit the Get Involved page.  You can follow WUD blog to stay current on the latest happenings with World Usability Day and to learn about events in your area.

Interview with Dr. Deborah J Mayhew, Internationally Acclaimed Author, Lecturer & Usability Consultant

Among Dr. Mayhew’s many accomplishments, she is the author of several influential Usability books and has been applying her significant usability engineering expertise for Fortune 100 companies since 1986. Dr. Mayhew holds a Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology from Tufts University, an M.A. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Denver and a B.A. in Psychology from Brown University. Her books, “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle” and “Cost-Justifying Usability” are in my opinion two classics of Usability and User-Centered design.

1. What’s your background? Where did you go to school, what subjects interested you?

I majored in Psychology in college, discovering Cognitive Psychology late in my college years. Other subfields of psychology had interested me, but when I finally encountered Cognitive Psychology, I knew I had found my calling. What could be more fascinating than the internal workings of the human mind?!

I then applied to graduate school in Experimental Psychology, went to the University of Denver for my Masters where my initial Advisor was a researcher in intelligence testing, and finished my PhD at Tufts University.

My area of specialization was human problem solving, but I also studied general cognition, perception, developmental cognitive psychology, statistics, and neuro-psychology among other subtopics. My research assistantships involved work at the Colorado State Penitentiary doing IQ testing, and work in a primate lab tracking the social behaviors of macaque monkeys. Both my Masters and PhD theses were on topics in human problem solving.

2. How did you get into the usability field?

My graduate education was almost entirely funded by grant money. But one summer while at Tufts working towards my PhD, there was no grant money available for a stipend, so I needed to find a summer job to pay the rent. I had learned some programming skills in graduate school, so I looked for a programming job for the summer. I landed a job at a small high powered contract development and consulting firm in Cambridge, MA started up by some recent MIT graduates. This was 1978, and a PhD candidate in Psychology could easily get a job as a programmer.

At summer’s end, I liked it so much I decided to stay on. I got permission from Tufts to work full time while finishing my doctorate, which at that point, was mostly just completing my thesis. I worked for almost 4 years as a software developer and IT management consultant till I finished my PhD.

Then I took a job as probably one of the very earliest software usability professionals, at Honeywell Information Systems. That was in 1981. I was at the right place at the right time with the right set of dual backgrounds: software development and cognitive psychology. The field of software usability was just emerging.

I worked at Honeywell for a couple of years, then at Wang Laboratories a couple of years, and then went back to academia. I got a position as an assistant professor in the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, where I spent a couple of years teaching usability courses to both undergrads and grad students. In 1986 I launched my consulting business, probably one of the first full time independent consultancies in software usability in the nation. I have been an independent consultant ever since, now in my 24th year.

3. What is it about usability that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

Although I have been working in the software industry since 1978, I still mainly consider myself a cognitive psychologist. I love learning and thinking about how the human mind works in the intellectual, information processing sense. In particular, human learning, memory, creativity and problem solving, as well as the more recent connections of those phenomenon to brain science, fascinate me. I enjoy the problem of applying what we know about cognition to the design of software user interfaces.

I enjoy all aspects of usability engineering – I like doing the research to understand different kinds of work people do and how they think about it and organize it. I really love doing user interface design. I also love applying what I learned about the scientific method in grad school to designing usability tests that will yield valid and useful results, and provide insight into how people approach software.

In addition, I love being a consultant because of the opportunity it provides to sample a lot of different industries, hardware/software platforms, application types and user types. The variety keeps it fresh for me.

I also love being independent. The only job as an employee I ever enjoyed was my first one as a programmer for a small firm of 50 people. Large corporations and academia were very frustrating work environments for me. Relative freedom from organizational politics and control of my lifestyle are very important to me. I live in a very rural area in a community I have been a part of since I was born, which is a lifestyle I love. Being independent means I can live where I want and how I want. The internet has meant I need to travel less and less to work with my clients, who are all over the nation and the world.

4. Your early research with usability and user-centered design methods (for example, “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle” from 1999) has been standard reading for anyone interested in an education in usability, how did you come up with this approach, what were your inspirations?

It’s a little hard to remember!

Certainly all my methodology was built on the work of others. I taught my first tutorial at CHI in 1986 (the very first CHI conference was in 1983), and the basic framework of my Usability Engineering Lifecycle was already there.

I think my main contribution with the 1999 book was synthesizing a lot of well established individual techniques into a lifecycle process. There is very little that is original in the techniques I describe in that book – what is unique is how they are all pulled together in a logical sequence where each one feeds into the next, as well as the templates, examples and war stories I included.

I never planned to write a book. I was teaching at Northeastern University in 1985 when a recruiter for Prentice-Hall came around my department hoping to talk professors into signing contracts to write text books. They put the idea in my head, and I started writing my first book, Principles and Guidelines for Software User Interface Design, which they published in 1992. I had originally planned for a single book to include both principles and methods, but the principles half got so big I decided to defer the methods for another book, which I then published in 1999.

As for the “Cost Justifying Usability” books, I had an “aha!” moment after reading an early article on the topic by Marilyn Mantei, then gave a talk at a conference on the topic. Randolph Bias attended that talk, and then decided the time was ripe for a book on this topic and contacted me to collaborate.

5. In 2001, you had argued that Discount User Experience methods would not sufficiently reduce project risk and insure Return On Investment. You had further stated that paying for Spot usability checks by “Gurus” would not either. In today’s environment, with AGILE software development processes, do you still hold to that belief, why or why not?

That is a very interesting question!

Yes, I do still hold that belief, perhaps even more so.

I view an application user interface as a coherent, unified system, that cannot be effectively designed piecemeal. Its like an automobile, a huge bridge, the human body, or any other complex system – all the parts have to work together in an integrated, smooth way. Thus, any approach that does not consider the whole is not going to be very effective.

I cannot look at a few individual functions, screens or pages and give effective advice on how to design them, without understanding the complete set of functionality across the whole application, not to mention a lot of key things about the users, the tasks they are doing, and the environment they are doing them in.

For instance, I cannot recommend using bold or a color as a cue for something like required fields, without knowing all the things that need to be consistently cued across the application and what cues I am going to use for what. Not to mention the fact that there needs to be a coherent information architecture that can only be designed based on an understanding of users’ tasks and the full set of functionality being offered in an application.

So for me, any approach that does not consider the entire application is going to fail to achieve consistency and coherence, the fundamentals of usability, and any approach that does not incorporate detailed information about users, tasks and environment is going to miss opportunities to tailor an interface to those requirements.

I think you truly get what you pay for.

There may be simple little page design issues that can be addressed without the big picture, but they are not going to buy you all that much. The most bang for the buck comes with higher level issues of information architecture and conceptual model design. So, the briefer and shallower the analysis, the higher the risk of missing key usability issues and opportunities.

As for Agile, I think there is an inherent conflict between that approach and sound usability engineering. I advocate a top down approach to UI design, that starts with the information architecture (in turn premised on an understanding of the full set of intended functionality and user tasks), and then a conceptual model design which is a set of standards for the visual presentation of and interaction with the IA, followed last by page detail design standards. That is, big picture established first, details to follow.

While I am not a student of the Agile method and have not actually practiced it (so far I have not worked with a client who has adopted it), I learned a little about it while consulting with a firm building software tools to support the Agile methodology.

While there is much about the Agile approach that is attractive (lots of iterations, feedback from the customer throughout, discovery of requirements as you go along via concrete prototypes), I think there is only so far you can get by putting a system together piecemeal, without considering the overall framework.

I wonder about the Agile approach because it seems to me that just like UI design, in system architecture design a top down approach is also most efficient and effective. The only way I can imagine the Agile approach working effectively is if a great deal of rework is done along the way as the discovery process evolves.

You cannot build a patchwork UI and have it be usable (or easily maintainable for that matter.) Thus, if you are going to approach it in a piecemeal way, there is a point at which you are going to have to throw out a lot of work and start from the top and design a coherent framework, in order to impose order on chaos.

One could certainly take an approach to UI design that would be compatible with the Agile philosophy and approach – I am just not convinced it will be either effective or efficient.

6. In your book “Cost Justifying Usability” you made the case that you must align your cost justification to the audience. How should a usability practitioner respond if the audience is a CFO, and that CFO expressly desires a “guaranteed” Return On Investment?

Great question!

And one I have thought about a fair amount. I have indeed been asked on occasion, and recently more often, to “guarantee” that my work will improve usability in some measurable way.

At first blush it seems like a perfectly reasonable request – I do after all claim that there can be a dramatic return on investment from expert usability work. However, the question is, how can the impact of usability work accurately be assessed?

Let’s consider an example. Imagine we are consulting on an e-commerce web site. The goal is increased sales, or “conversions.” A client might say to me, how about if you guarantee that your work will increase our conversion rate by at least 1% (which could be cost-justified, given my quote), or we will not pay. There are a number of problems here:

First, unless the client is willing to implement all of my redesign recommendations, exactly as specified, I cannot be held responsible for the results. This may seem reasonable to the client, but for many reasons – some technical, some political – they rarely do this. Who is to say if they have come close enough to implementing my recommendations for me to be held accountable for the results?

In many if not most of my consulting jobs, the client only takes some of my recommendations, or implements them in a somewhat different way than I specified. If this is the case, I cannot take responsibility for the results.

Second, many things impact conversion rates other than usability. For example, suppose a client took and completely implemented all my recommendations exactly . . . . just prior to the dot-com bust, or just prior to the recent recession? Who is to say whether it is the economy or my design that has impacted conversions?

Third, such a guarantee can work against my client too. What if they implement technical improvements which make their website work better on more browsers, or the economy picks up, at the same time they also implement my recommendations? Even if my recommendations are not responsible, other factors may raise conversion rates, and they would have to pay me regardless of whether I earned it or not.

It is rare that the only thing that changes from one release to another is the UI design. Usually many other things, both internal and external to the web site, change as well. In anything but a well controlled laboratory study, it is very hard to determine the sources of changes in measures of success or failure.

Fourth, if I could take controlled, laboratory-based before and after measures of usability in a project and use those as the measure of my contribution, that might at first blush seem reasonable. But, as we all know, UI design is part science and part art. Few of us could reasonably guarantee an improvement if not afforded the opportunity to iteratively test and redesign.

It’s rare that a client is willing to pay for multiple iterations of redesign and testing, or even before and after measures, so the criteria to determine if the the guarantee has been met or not is simply not cost effective in most cases.

In general, there are just too many other factors in play besides UI design that impact measures of usability. Thus, I don’t think its unreasonable to decline these sorts of requests for guarantees.

Finally, full time usability employees (or employees in any field for that matter) are not asked to guarantee a specific payoff from their work in order to get paid their salary, and I do not see any reason why consultants should either.

Unlike employees, clients simply do not have to rehire us if they are not happy with our work. They generally have to live with poorly performing employees. Consultants survive (or not) by establishing credibility in other ways – word of mouth, references, publishing well regarded books, etc.

What I offer my potential clients instead of guarantees is success stories.

For example, a large government client from a couple of years ago recently contacted me to work on a new release of an intranet I had redesigned for them previously. They had implemented most of my previous recommendations, and told me that the new design had been a big success:

User complaints had dropped from 10% to 0%.
Many more users had adopted the intranet as a work tool.
They had received an internal award for innovation.
Their intranet was now considered an example of best practices in usable design within their agency.
They found they had much more clout in recruiting other internal development projects to adhere to some of their standards.

When you can cite stories like this, and give references from clients who have benefited from your work in these ways, this is good enough to be expected to be paid for your time and expertise.

7. Social Media, with its almost instant communications threshold has seen rampant growth in the past few years. How are the Social web and instant connected communications like Twitter, FaceBook, Instant Messaging and the like changing usability and usability testing, or are they?

I wouldn’t say social media is actually changing usability or usability testing – they are just new types of applications, where all the same old principles and methods of usability still apply.

When the web first came along, people said the same thing, they seemed to think everything we had learned about usability in the context of traditional desktop applications had suddenly gone out the window, and we had to start all over again.

It just was not true.

People have not changed much in the last 50 years (or 50,000 for that matter) and all of the principles of usability are premised on understanding human information processing capabilities and weaknesses. Usability methods are similarly premised on how to measure and interpret human behavior.

While changes in technology do open up new possibilities, or place new constraints on the design of human-computer interaction (eg, limits of handheld mobile devices), most of the design principles and methods are universal and platform-independent.

For example, human memory constraints, and the advantages of consistency, are the same regardless of whether you are designing for a large screen, or a handheld device – you just have to apply the principles to different technological constraints and capabilities. Similarly, testing a design on either type of platform will follow a very similar if not identical methodology.

What I do find interesting about social media in the context of the business world is the opportunity to consider incorporating the concept of social media into corporate software to build community, share corporate knowledge assets more effectively and promote professional networking for the organization’s benefit.

I have just been helping a client consider how to use these new concepts to support their business goals through their intranet, and the possibilities seem to have a lot of potential. There will certainly be usability issues in designing these capabilities and usability testing will be just as important as ever. There is just not a whole lot of new principles to be revealed or methodologies to be devised. The same tried and true usability approaches will work just fine.

By the way, my opinion (and the opinion of many of my peers) is that Facebook has an abysmal user interface. They keep changing it, but apparently not based on any usability science, as it remains flawed, just in different ways with each modification.

Social media applications need usability input, just as any other type of software application.

If someone produced an application with the same functionality and a superior user experience, Facebook would be in trouble, just as IBM was in trouble when the Apple Macintosh came out.

8. In your opinion, what’s next for usability? What should usability practitioners and web site designers be focusing on for the future, say the next 2-3 years?

I think designing good UIs for small mobile/handheld devices is going to be a big area for our field, and applying social media in ways like I just described above as well.

In addition, I think we need to welcome and learn to work effectively with other professions and skillsets required to create a truly optimal User Experience: graphic designers, eCommerce “persuasion” experts, SEO experts, pay-per-click experts, etc.

The most powerful and successful user experiences require all these elements (and probably more), and it’s amazing what we can create working in interdisciplinary teams, that none of us could produce alone.

9. What are your plans for the future? What are you looking forward to doing next in your career?

Well, actually, I am working on a very exciting new project which I cannot talk about yet. Ask me again in about 6 months!

Thank you Dr. Deborah Mayhew!

It’s refreshing to hear that even with all the changes in terms of communications and the near-instant aspect of the new Social Media, the same basics of good usability and user-centered design apply.

For more information about Dr. Deborah Mayhew visit her web site at:

http://drdeb.vineyard.net