How real usability works

It just so happened, but recently the author is increasingly beginning to observe disputes about the meaninglessness of investing huge amounts of money in design and UX, which, they say, practically do not pay off. In the fever of disputes, the arguments are used up to the point of frankly manipulative: “ When your child urgently needs an ambulance, you will not choose her from the photo on the site ... ” And so, this article is designed to refute once and for all all the rumors about the inappropriateness and low economic effect of usability. Usability is either real engineering, or fake trending.

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Of course, most companies absolutely do not need a separate user experience specialist, just as they do not need a separate expert on salary for rational offers, or a deputy director for infographics. But the atmosphere of a constant search for useful improvements, a healthy spirit of innovation and the work of engineering are required in any healthy team from all employees without exception, and not just from an illustrator and a button artist. And even in the ancient and archaic USSR, this was perfectly understood already many decades ago.

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For example, the railroad had long ago had high-quality effective usability, and it was everywhere. It’s just that they weren’t doing it beautifully, as if hipsters with macbooks had come off the covers of glossy magazines at the ready, but simple operators, engineers, technologists, and they were doing this in addition to their main labor activity. And they received quite real prizes for their rationalization proposals at the annual competitions of rationalizers, which went not only with beautiful bright slides, but also with a ready-made calculated economic effect (this is the key phrase of the article).

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Why did Russian Railways for a long time try not to hire beautiful-looking design specialists from a glamorous party to meet its needs with various improvements and optimizations of technological processes? Yes, because for a good understanding of such processes, any person should take years of personal practice or outside observation. And only then the necessary delay in the right place was able to give millions of savings throughout the state corporation, and the proposal to refuse “mice” (even ball-type, on dirty tables of station operators working more like mini-vacuum cleaners) in favor of “hot keys” could be calculated not only from the point of view of money, but also from the point of view of temporary savings (to call a specialist at the station to disassemble and clean the garbage ball).

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We also mention that the author of the article is distrustful of the problem solving experts who have appeared everywhere and who, when they come to the company from the outside and quickly glance at the accumulated tangle of problems, instantly find the optimal solution and take thousands of dollars for advice. No, I believe in the power of the human mind, but I can hardly imagine the level of confidence of a major leader in such fleeting experts. Here, take at least the same case with the always-soaring “mice”.

To begin with, we postulate the thought: even a child can hypothetically give wise advice in any business, and for this it is not at all necessary to grow a beard or acquire an iPhone of the latest model. Even a child can come to mom’s work, see how she constantly freaks out, knocks her mouse off the table with the next logbook, and by the evening she’s already aching joint from many hours of trying to get into the right pictogram on the screen. It’s absolutely certain that the brain of an ordinary elementary school student is enough to observe all this and say: “Mommy, this little thing is bothering you so much.” Tell me, why, instead of constantly tugging at her hand, simply press the buttons on the table? ”. Just a little observation and sincere love for the mother, no TRIZ courses and usability seminars are required here.

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But will the mother’s boss and the boss of his boss, having heard such advice from a child or even from an adult, but an outsider expert, throw themselves headlong under the table and immediately pull the mouse cord from the system unit? No, of course, because at the moment the economic effect of such advice is zero for him. It’s the same as getting “tips on the run” during the next evening party with startups in Silicon Valley .

If this same student with a group of engineers and technologists spends a couple of months on evidence and substantiating his position, he will calculate the costs of money, time and diesel fuel, as well as side effects, and provide his mother’s boss (the one above and the one above) with a document on 200 sheets, where the benefits of introducing his proposal will be written down to a pretty penny, and the benefits are real, expressed in standard values: rubles, kilowatts, ton-kilometers, man-hours - such a school rationalizer instantly becomes a UX expert on standing work with user experience. He may not hear anything about Nielsen, sketch, macbooks, Lebedev, fillets - but the presence of the actual economic effect of several million rubles instantly makes him a great usability guru. Once and for all, he improved the interaction of the user and the information system. Now this schoolchild can calmly conduct design courses and conduct seminars for thousands of dollars until the end of his life.

As I said, it’s quite difficult for me to imagine a third-party Troubleshooter who spends two or three months of his life at first observing and painstaking analysis of a real (not paper-reporting) problem situation, and then a couple of months more - for multi-page calculation and monetary argument effect from your advice. But it’s even harder for me to imagine that a real expert Trouble-shooter will be initially hired to find a solution to pressing problems with a typical operator at a distant station.

“But who needs them, who sees them there in the middle of the taiga?”- for about several generations, this attitude to the lower ranks as to cannon fodder, embedded in our Russian DNA, will prevent us all from noticing that real work with user experience or improving customer interactions ALWAYS lies outside sites, buttons and microanimations. People are always sore joints and children's fears, eternal haste and wandering thoughts, indecision and conflicts, fatigue, drowsiness, hunger, resentment towards a colleague, a shaking boot, a scratchy back, collapsed life plans and a couple of loans on the neck. Here it would not be a shift of the button a couple of pixels to the left, here would be with love and care; it wouldn’t be with typical design snobbery and narcissism - but with a sincere desire, like the first Christians, to help your neighbor, and with the understanding that hasty decisions,

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It goes without saying that the desire to observe and help, that the love of one’s neighbor and the ability to mathematically justify every sentence are initially peculiar to almost all people, regardless of gender and race (typical until the first professional disappointments appear), which is why for the implementation of these usability standards of any enterprise, you will have to either call each of your employees as a “UX guru” plus his main position (well, for trending and motivation), or introduce a “soviet” culture offers, rewarding each and every one of its lowest employees for engineering-based multi-million dollar benefits brought to employees or customers, in general - to your business.

And finally, a motivating picture for your designer from the series “Are you weak?”:

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