Usability Conference

I was wondering if anybody attended the Internet Magazine usability conference on the 8th of Oct? I went together with a client, and overall, was thoroughly disappointed.

The keynote speaker was the man himself, Jakob Nielsen. I can't say that I was expecting any revelations, but at the very least I hoped he would raise some issues that he hadn't covered in detail in his published material. Alas, I felt I had heard it all before.

The majority of the other speakers were so intent on pushing their product or company that I felt I was at a conference on how not to be a salesman. If I wanted to listen to an ecommerce package creator tell me how great their product was, I'm sure I wouldn't have to pay £350 for that privilege...

One thing that I had hoped Jakob would discuss, and a notion that I still struggle with re usability, is that it inherently depends on the user. For example, take two liquid containers. One is a standard mug, whilst the other is a mug with a drinking funnel on top, as used by toddlers. The formed is clearly usable by anyone over, say the age of 5. Give it to a toddler and usability is zero. On the other hand the latter is perfectly usable for a toddler, yet placed in the hands of an adult would slow the drinking process down considerably. Surely the same applies to the web? Or perhaps I'm missing the point...

The eternal 'Flash is 99% bad debate', of course, raised its ugly head. The speaker from Macromedia was excellent, especially as by that point, at least two of the speakers had questioned flash's very existence. At the same time, he still failed to get across what I believe many people miss when dealing with Flash and the usability issue, and that is that although sites which are purely Flash could be argued to have a lower level of usability, sites with instances of flash surely can't. For example, a flash application (such as an interactive map as a v basic example) which forms one very small aspect of a site can surely not affect the site's usability. The user has 100% choice as to view the flash map or alternatively select the less exciting and useful static version. The user's 'use' of the site has been in no way hindered.

If anybody else did attend, I would be interested to hear your thoughts. In future I will check a conference's itinerary more closely, and not be swayed by the presence of one well known speaker!

On 20:14:16 10 October 2001 bennowas wrote:
>I was wondering if anybody attended the Internet Magazine
>usability conference on the 8th of Oct? I went together
>with a client, and overall, was thoroughly disappointed.

Yep, me too. I don't agree that just because 'usability is becoming more accepted' we are all destined to sit and hear the same message again and again - I think there's huge room to answer the questions that need to be answered and to give real value for money.

It's a bit like attending a conference on healthy living - only to have lots of speakers tell you of the dangers of getting fat and eating burgers. That's great, but just 'how' do we live healthy..?

Case studies are also interesting, but again of very little use - it's rare that a client can take anything directly useful from a case study, it just proves the point that usability does work. Anyone attending the conference who already knew that usability was worth paying attention to (and who would attend the conference otherwise?) would have already guessed that usability was an important element.

What I was hoping to see and what my customers are always asking for is practical help - what processes should they be using? How should they apply them? What can they do with zero budget? How can they internalise processes without going to expensive consultants? How much is 'too little' when testing? Etc...

In their defence, I spoke briefly to a woman from Internet Magazine during the day, and she said that this message was coming through loud and clear and that they intended to offer more practical conferences in the future.

let's hope so, eh?

Gary Bunker, Usability by Design