Tag Archives: upa

World Usability Day, talks at LBi

Today is World Usability Day. I attended an event hosted by UPA at LBi, on Baker Street. The usual light refreshments were served, and the talks were interesting – on the topic on transportation. There was another event going on at System Concepts where talks addressed the topic of Global Positioning Systems, which had a more ergonomic slant.

In conjunction with the UPA event, Aquent launched a directory for User Experience practitioners. I picked up a copy and there were a lot of interesting articles contributed by UPA professionals and other practitioners. The topics seemed to be cover a lot of trends that have been impacting the usability industry lately, such as the poor economic situation, advancing mobile devices, and employable skills. There’s a lot of subjectivity with a lot of usability topics, but the articles are mostly relevant and useful, if not timely. You might be able to get a copy from Human Factors International, UPA, or Aquent as they were the main sponsors.

I couldn’t remember all the names of the speakers featured today. Scott Weiss from Human Factors International opened up the session with a brief introduction to the transportation topic by sharing his own gripes about the TfL website and how challenging it was from a usability perspective for him to get from his home to the UPA event. He made an interesting point that the exemplar bus service routes displayed prominently on bus stands should be reproduced on their online variants for the same visual clarity. It was meant to be lighthearted, but it caused a bit of stir in the crowd as it was only scratching at the surface of both the merits and the pitfalls of the complex government-linked organization and its services.

Nevertheless, it got us thinking about transportation.

The next speaker then got us thinking about online airline ticketing websites, and how that has fundamentally changed the way people travel. A bit of historical backdrop reveals how the early ticketing websites were a far cry from the large computers that were used in traditional ticketing systems – surfacing from three months’ worth of three guys hacking away at computers in a garage, and ended up being sold for millions of dollars. There were references to EasyJet’s online ticketing system, which led to the next talk about a prototype future ticketing system, presented by Peter Otto from Flow Interactive.

The exciting part about this “EasyJet 2.0” system was about how it also deals with users’ questions of “I want to go somewhere but I’m not sure when” and “I’m not sure where I want to go” – rather than the buyer’s method of dealing with flight tickets. EasyJet 2.0 identifies pricing options for tickets on various dates in the year, giving users some idea of planning for a trip.

Also, for the case where users wasn’t sure where they wanted to go – they could browse major destinations from their home starting point, based on a specific budget. This was produced on a slick visual interface using charts and maps, that showed immediately which slots in the month were most cost-effective, and which places were best to visit at a certain price.

There’s an interactive page that shows how the whole thing works.

I’ll be attending the last UPA event for the year in a few weeks, hopefully.

Usability vs. Innovation? Stop already.

I was attending a UPA talk yesterday, and although I came in toward the end of the session, managed to catch a glimpse of what was about to turn into a flame war about how companies aren’t really innovating to their fullest potential. The speaker also apparently implied that usability is becoming less effective a tool in making great innovation happen, to which some people clearly disagreed.

It’s interesting to note that Martyn Perks has mentioned these things before, in a similar way a few years ago, also at another UPA event, so it seems he’s making a name for himself on this.

I’m setting aside the obvious flame baits here, because innovation and usability can too often be defined in ways that mean lots of things depending on what you’re talking about. Maybe what Perks was referring to reads something along the lines of this research article, which evaluates how (occasionally rigorous or ‘standardized’) usability work can hinder the creative progression that may be essential to produce effective innovation (whatever that innovation means).

I feel this comparison is partly pointless already, but I am summarizing my reasons as to why I feel this is so.

1. inevitably, all solutions are aimed at the long term and the wider good

Cast the net, aim for the greater good – let’s make both the usability and innovation folks happy. Let’s make them celebrate why they believe usability and innovation are so deeply connected to one another, it would be ridiculous to separate them – even if there are differences between the two.

2. don’t be afraid to use the P word

Politics are an obvious reason why we often do any innovating or usabilit-izing(?), or not. It may not have to be the case of the-bad-boss, since even small groups at peer level suffer from organizational behaviour influences. One case study I learnt this week revealed how a information architecture project failed because some people were afraid they would lose their jobs to an effectively redesigned website. This is one reason why I don’t think we’ll be seeing robots more than we’ll be seeing secretaries over the next 100 years (secretaries always do a better job).

3. many different people are good. many different people are bad.

Information architects. Brand strategists. Marketers. Usability testers. Users. Organizational psychologists. How many terms do we need for people who get paid to solve “new” problems for old and clueless people who can’t understand it anyway? And it seems that everyone has a specific trait, formed quite commonly by a shared interest in being really creative, solving real problems, and making real users happy. So why is there such an internal confusion? Let’s be nice to one another, since the future is inevitably ours since old people die anyway, and the clueless move on.

4. So what if the word usability and innovation has been overused?

Everyone knows what it sort of means, just work around it. We’ve beaten this to death.

I’ll do my best to attend the next and final UPA talk in London before 2009 comes around. Hopefully with less flame baits.