Jared, I realized after I hit 'Send' that I was danger of implying that 'design = making things pretty' or something similar, but the deed was done. Design and Usability can be treated as: 1. Two ends of a continuum/spectrum 2. Two sides a coin 3. Two intersecting circles in a Venn diagram 4. <insert your favorite metaphor here>
Now, there is a wide variety of professions that use the term 'designer' in their title, and these range from 'people who make pretty things' to 'people who build railroad tracks' (to pick something really mundane and far removed from art and prettiness). Perhaps there's no need to make distinctions between Usability and Design. Then there's certainly no need to have two separate professional associations (UPA and IxDA). I know that this debate has been going on for a while and probably will never be resolved, or eventually become irrelevant. Now, coming to what 'Usable' means. Does 'delight' also come under the category? If so, where do we draw the line? Was the act of designing a feature/attribute that caused 'delight'? Let's take response time -- say, I click on a link and the page comes up in 2 microseconds -- I'm delighted. Does that make the site more usable? It certainly makes it more likely that I will click on that link again. But delight is a general response to a variety of phenomena. I see something pretty, and I am delighted. I learn that I don't have to wait as long as I had anticipated and I am delighted. The first response was grounded in aesthetics, while the second was in efficiency. My delight was a result of an absence of frustration. The 'mere' elimination of frustration, pain, effort generates delight. When I, Usability Expert, advise a client to Do This In Order to Make Your Site More Usable, am I providing Usability or Design advice? When you "spend a lot of time thinking about the delight side of the equation and what designers can do to increase it", aren't you, in fact, engaged, at least to some extent, in the task of design? I'm not trying to contradict you -- what you say is perfectly reasonable. I'm just not sure where 'usability' ends and 'design' begins. There are people who work at the extreme ends of the spectrum (assuming there is a spectrum) and there are those (probably the majority) who are simultaneously attending to design as well as usability. I suppose, wherever design involves human beings, one cannot but attend to both simultaneously; even a hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, no-nonsense, beer-swilling, gruff, hairy, pot-bellied, engineer when designing a car, is unlikely to build a seat with spikes all over them; it most probably will be 'seat-like', even if he has never seen a seat before. So, Does it make sense to make distinctions between actions that 'increase usability' and actions that 'improve design'. How are these two different? Do they actually mean the same thing? Can you enhance/reduce one without affecting the other -- i.e., are 'usability' and 'design' independent? I resolved this issue for myself by making what is perhaps an artificial distinction -- individuals probably draw the line of distinction (if any) at different places. -- murli -- murli nagasundaram, ph.d. | www.murli.com | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +91 99 02 69 69 20 - Find your purpose; the means will follow - Mahatma Gandhi ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
