November 27, 2008 at 13:41Usability vs Marketing
Interestingly, is this just my impression? - What exactly those who are hilling the market on the topic of usability have little sense in it. It’s worth at least looking at their sites / products. Not to mention the courses and seminars that they conduct for completely newcomers who have not yet understood that business education itself is just and only a way to cut off the money from naive lamb (well, or to get yourself some advertising / PR).
I specifically do not want to give any examples, because this will cause a war of subjective addictions. But when to the goal the user is forced to make more than 2 clicks, when he needs more than 5 seconds. move the mouse around the screen to understand where the link is located, when it takes the time to fix the data output imposed on it by default - this is not even a lack of usability, but just a bad manners towards the user.
But when it comes to displaying advertising, then he certainly should see it immediately and inevitably. And no one here recalls usability.
And not just about sites speech. Some software products of the famous monopolist are specially designed so that they, by default, for greater usability, set their markup parameters (for example, everyone who worked with MS Office faced this) - and in order to understand how to remove these unnecessary indents , extra numbering of paragraphs, etc., you have to pick your own quite annoying amount of time or go through the appropriate paid courses , where they can teach all the nuances (or they may not, it’s important that you have already formed a need for such courses so that you gave money for them).
And I don’t even mention television ...
It's time to honestly admit: the interests of business and the interests of the user in matters of usability are often and everywhere perpendicular, and therefore all statements and all self-promotion of the so-called usability specialists must first pass through the filter the contradictions of these interests.
To develop the ideas of usability and its application to products, instead of all kinds of courses and discussions, it would be much more useful to create a certain base of examples where conflicts of interests of the user — optimally convenient and quick to achieve the goal, and interests of the businessman — optimally convenient and quick to achieve profit — the most noticeable.
I specifically do not want to give any examples, because this will cause a war of subjective addictions. But when to the goal the user is forced to make more than 2 clicks, when he needs more than 5 seconds. move the mouse around the screen to understand where the link is located, when it takes the time to fix the data output imposed on it by default - this is not even a lack of usability, but just a bad manners towards the user.
But when it comes to displaying advertising, then he certainly should see it immediately and inevitably. And no one here recalls usability.
And not just about sites speech. Some software products of the famous monopolist are specially designed so that they, by default, for greater usability, set their markup parameters (for example, everyone who worked with MS Office faced this) - and in order to understand how to remove these unnecessary indents , extra numbering of paragraphs, etc., you have to pick your own quite annoying amount of time or go through the appropriate paid courses , where they can teach all the nuances (or they may not, it’s important that you have already formed a need for such courses so that you gave money for them).
And I don’t even mention television ...
It's time to honestly admit: the interests of business and the interests of the user in matters of usability are often and everywhere perpendicular, and therefore all statements and all self-promotion of the so-called usability specialists must first pass through the filter the contradictions of these interests.
To develop the ideas of usability and its application to products, instead of all kinds of courses and discussions, it would be much more useful to create a certain base of examples where conflicts of interests of the user — optimally convenient and quick to achieve the goal, and interests of the businessman — optimally convenient and quick to achieve profit — the most noticeable.