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Usability
and User Experience Design:

The Next Decade

BY CHAUNCEY E.WILSON Senior Member, Northern New England Chapter

and design activities and move from tactical to strategic thinking. In this article, I will describe what I view as important trends that usability practitioners should consider as they plan for this transition.

he term usability can be traced back as far as 1382 (Oxford English Dictionar y, (OED) online edition), but the first reference that seems to anticipate our field appeared in Blackwells Magazine around 1842: It is not the utility, but the useability of a thing which is in question (OED online, www.oed .com). In the 162 years since the Blackwells Magazine reference, there has been a shift from making products functional and usable to improving the entire user experience with a product or service. This shift is highlighted by the changing terminology in our field. The buzzwords for the 1980s and 1990s were functionality, usability, usability engineering, and user-centered design. In the 2000s, the term user experience engineering started to appear in job ads. Prominent colleagues like Patrick Jordan and Don Norman started encouraging practitioners to look beyond traditional usability concerns such as ease of learning and effectiveness to broader user issues such as aesthetics, collaboration, accessibility, credibility, persuasion, and pleasure. Many usability practitioners have focused on at least some of these issues, but in the next decade I believe that practitioners will need to expand their repertoire of knowledge and skills beyond traditional usability

Trend 1:

While the concept of whole product design has been around since the mid1980s at least, I am finally seeing that concept come to fruition as we move from a focus on product usability, where ease of learning, ease of use, and satisfaction with the interface and documentation are paramount, to broader issues that include branding, aesthetics, fun, and pleasure. This evolution follows a hierarchy of user needs with functionality at the base, usability in the middle, and pleasure and emotional satisfaction at the top. Patrick Jordan, an advocate of pleasurable design, describes how this progression from functionality to pleasure is similar to Maslows hierarchy of human needs, wherein people move up the hierarchy as their needs are fulfilled at lower levels. Usability practitioners have tools to understand functionality and usability, but they must now add tools for understanding what products need to move to
January 2005

The focus of product design and evaluation will be the total user experience.

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the highest, or pleasurable, level of the hierarchy. These tools can include Kansei (pleasure) engineering, the Kano method, the repertory grid technique, and laddering. This trend is supported by recent books and articles on emotional design, pleasurable design, and funology (see suggested reading).

Trend 2:

Return on investment (ROI) has been a buzzword in the usability arena for about a decade, and the pressure to justify what we do is increasing yearly. During the late 1990s, when the economy was booming, I didnt see a lot of concern for ROI measures related to usability (though many articles were written on the topic). The concern for usability ROI started growing with the economic slump beginning around 2000, and companies now routinely ask how our efforts to improve usability relate to either internal ROI (cost savings) or external ROI (increased revenues). You may be asked in a job interview to explain how various usability activities can affect costs and revenues. While the emphasis in articles on ROI is often on how usability activities make the product better, it might be more important to understand how those activities affect the internal development process. Usability groups should consider collecting metrics that show how they improve the process as well as the product. For example, can you show that you reduce the number of problems that might have required rework late in development or (dont laugh) that you reduce the amount of unproductive meeting time? Collecting internal and external metrics requires developing a solid usability infrastructure that can support the ROI metrics.

Employers will ask usability practitioners to provide more evidence of their impact on corporate return on investment.

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How do groups affect the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals? How do groups affect other groups? How do individuals affect the behavior of groups? Important topics in social psychology include group formation and identity, persuasion, credibility, trust, power, conformity, and deviance from a group. While some consideration of social psychology has been with us since the early days of groupware and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), the

emergence of online communities, virtual groups, and the Internet in general has accelerated the need to understand how a system influences the interactions between individuals and groups. B. J. Fogg, for example, wrote a recent book that applied the principles of persuasion from social psychology research to the design of technology. In the e-commerce world, corporations (groups) are trying to design systems that persuade us (individuals) to buy their products or services. Usability is an important issue for ecommerce, but it is not usually sufficient to persuade us to buy from one vendor rather than another. However, the use of persuasive principles such as the foot-inthe-door principle, reciprocity, liking, similarity, and consistency can be built into an online system and influence our decision. Knowing these principles and how to evaluate designs for their persuadability requires some background in social psychology. Remote collaboration tools that allow groups to conduct remote meetings or usability tests are built on social psychology principles. Simple things like the rules for taking turns in a conversation or knowing who is in on the meeting require an understanding of the social psychology of the groups involved. A remote tool, for example, could indicate with some type of symbol that a senior executive is listening in on the meeting (a factor that could alter the tone, tempo, and content of the meeting). Im seeing an increase in the number of books that deal with the social psychology of computer systems as evidence of this trend. These books include Powazeks Designing for Community and Preeces Online Communities. I recommend that usability practitioners add the basics of social psychology to their conventional repertoire of usability skills and knowledge.

Social psychology deals with three major research questions:

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Social psychology is becoming more important in the design of new collaboration and e-commerce technologies.

Trend 3:

Trend 4:

Usability practitioners, with rare exceptions, are not noted for their business acumen. To put user experience on an
January 2005

Business skills and savvy will become important criteria in hiring usability and user experience practitioners.

equal footing with other aspects of product design, usability practitioners must understand business goals, strategy, negotiation tactics, innovation, organizational change, and project management. Karen Donoghue describes how critical it is to align business and user experience goals in her book Built for Use. Some graduate programs in usability and human factors are starting to encourage (or require) students to take some business electives to complement courses in usability testing, user interface design, and prototyping. Don Norman has suggested that the only way we will get usability truly into the mainstream of development is for leaders in usability to become managers, directors, and vice presidents of development and marketing.

Trend 6:

Trend 5:

The need for strong facilitation skills has been emerging slowly over the past decade and will escalate with the growth of virtual teams, matrix management, and outsourcing of design. I can envision a new job role called strategic usercentered design (UCD) facilitator. This role focuses more on strategic facilitation (for example, getting executive support, doing high-level public relations, and training managers about the UCD process) than on tactical facilitation (conducting design meetings, test sessions, or brainstorming ideas for a particular product). The strategic UCD facilitator would work to get UCD activities into the mainstream of the development process. Another aspect of this role would be to pull together the various sources of data on users and their work (or play, depending on the product) and facilitate the sharing of this information at every level in a company or organization. The role of strategic UCD facilitator would require a high level of business savvy, knowledge of social psychology (quite useful for understanding how groups and stakeholders interact), and extremely well-honed listening, enabling, and interviewing skills. The UCD facilitator would focus on building a usability infrastructure and institutionalizing usability.
January 2005

Facilitation skills will become as important as design and evaluation skills.

There is a growing movement to assess the validity and reliability of some of our most cherished methods. In the 1990s, discount usability engineering became the unofficial standard for our field. The primary methods for the discount approach include think-aloud testing, inspections, and scenarios. While many practitioners have embraced these methods, there are few standards for procedures, data analysis, or reporting, and limited data on how effective these methods are for choosing reasonable designs and finding problems. Rolf Molich has been a

The validity and reliability of cherished usability methods will be examined.

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Summary

The next decade should be both exciting and somewhat destabilizing for usability practitioners, as we figure out how to move beyond usability, become more strategic in our vision, become more accountable as business partners, and begin to examine the foundations of our principles and methods. I propose that all practitioners put together a ten-year plan that takes these trends into account. These individual plans might include formal business training, a focus on ROI metrics, continuous self-assessment of skills and knowledge, and a consideration of both tactical (individual product design) and strategic (team, organization, political, and social) levels of user experience. The world of usability practitioners will be changing, and it is crucial to prepare for these changes. SUGGESTED READINGS Blythe, M. A., K. Overbeeke, A. F. Monk, and P. C. Wright (Eds.). Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Donoghue, K. Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Fogg, B. J. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003. Green, W. S., and P. W. Jordan (Eds.). Pleasure with Products: Beyond Usability. London: Taylor & Francis, 2002. Jordan, P. W. Designing Pleasurable Products: An Introduction to the New Human Factors. London: Taylor & Francis, 2000. Norman, D. A. Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Powazek, D. M. Designing for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places. Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002. Preece, J. Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, 2000.
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There is a growing movement to assess the validity and reliability of some of our most cherished methods.
leader in the move to assess the effectiveness of think-aloud usability testing and user interface inspections, and his Comparative Usability Evaluation studies (www.dialogdesign.dk) have shown that typical usability tests (five to fifteen participants using think-aloud protocols) and user interface inspections find only a small minority of the problems in many Web and software products. His work also reveals that different groups testing the same product often find quite different problems. While practical constraints may never allow us to have huge samples of participants or inspectors or to do as much field work as we would like, the trend to examine and question our methods will help set expectations for both usability groups and our clients about the validity and reliability of our methods.