Category: design

Happy World Usability Day

Today is World Usability Day. If you do nothing else about usability today, the least you can do is to observe a minute of silence (at noon EST) “as a means of sending out the hope that there be a greater respect for all users and their ability to make the world a better place, through the time won by greater usability.”

Maybe during that minute of silence, you could also heed designverb‘s suggestion and “think about everything that you use, touch, see, or hear and ask, how can I make it better? Is something broken, confusing, too complex, or just not working?” I know of one guy who thinks about that stuff, and then blogs about his frustrations with unusable products.

Failure to re-launch? Or ‘subtle evolution’?

Should organizations make a big deal about doing a major overhaul and re-launch of their web sites? Jared Spool, a usability design engineer who blogs at UIE Brain Sparks, thinks organizations would be better off making incremental change. In The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch, he writes that over his 10 years of work with web design, “if we’ve learned anything, it’s that redesigns rarely improve a site.”

“At best,” he writes, a redesign “just rearranges the elements. At worst, it frustrates the existing, loyal users without bringing anything valuable to all those new users the site is trying to attract.”

Spool wrote about this way back in 2003 (that was two re-launches ago for UMR) and urged organizations to consider “subtle evolution” as a way to incorporate changes on websites. He pointed out a few high-profile, real-world examples — Amazon, Yahoo and eBay — that have all benefited from this philosophy.