Usability experts komen van Mars, designers van Venus

Usability experts en designers lijken slecht met elkaar over weg te kunnen. Ondanks het feit dat ze hetzelfde doel nastreven – het ontwikkelen van bruikbare produkten – zijn de benaderingen totaal verschillend. Designer Joshua Porter beschrijft op zijn weblog een aantal aandachtspunten ter overweging.

5 Points Concerning Designers Vs. Usability Folks:

1. Designers have History

Visual design (loosely: the layout aspect of web design) has been around for centuries and is well documented. The intelligent use of line, color, contrast, whitespace and other principles will guarantee a good design. How did we come to trust in these principles if they weren’t so usable?

2. Usability Folks have Numbers

Usability is about measuring how well something works, making changes to it, and then seeing if there was improvement. You make improvements by finding a metric that you believe in (revenue, conversion rate, time to complete) and then making suggestions to the designers to improve that metric. In most cases there is improvement over time. This sort of incremental improvement is not possible without usability testing.

3. Designers Say Content is Design

Visual designers know that content is the design. You cannot separate presentation from the “thing”. Therefore, design is at least as important as content in whatever project you’re working on.

4. Usability Folks Say Content is King

Design is nothing without content, usability folks say. You cannot have design without content, but you can have content without (much) design. Therefore, we know which one is most important.

5. But Wait: Don’t We Have the Same Goals?

These arguments are two sides of the same coin. Both designers and usability folks want to make great products for people, so why the difficulty? Can’t everyone just get along?

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