Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox today, entitled “The Myth of the Genius Designer,” really struck a chord. Nielsen writes about the myth that a company can hire a great designer and that a great designer will eliminate the need for usability testing.
Not many designers will admit this, but I will say that I’ve made mistakes by making assumptions about a web site’s users. This was apparent last week when I attended a usability session for a client (more about that in a later post). Having spent lots of time in usability labs, I thought I had a good foundation to make assumptions about this client’s web site users. In fact, my assumptions were more inaccurate than I expected, and I realized this firsthand during a usability test.
Three of Nielsen’s points hit home for me, and I offer them here because they are truisms in the web design industry, whether web designers care to accept them or not.
The first is that “good designers get to be good in the first place by learning which of their ideas work and which don’t.” Good designers learn what works and what doesn’t through “empirical data, which usability provides.” It’s true that a designer has tools at their disposal to see what web site users click, etc., but nothing beats watching users use a web site you’ve designed. It can be a humbling–and very educational–experience.
The second is that “design is an inexact science,” and that “it’s only prudent to reduce risk and subject design ideas to a reality check by user testing them with actual customers.” I’d add that there is often more than one way to solve a usability problem, and user testing can reveal the best solution.
Finally, Nielsen writes that “even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.” How true. The only way to be certain what features are useful to a customer is to ask. Whether this is done through usability testing, feature set surveys or other methods, asking users what they find most helpful (and using common language to so so) is a prudent step before a designer opens Photoshop.
While some business managers choose not to perform usability testing or research up-front, setting aside the budget to do this will inform your design and produce a site that will be much more successful.
There are ways to perform this research inexpensively, but that’s a topic for another day. Stay tuned…
