Interview by Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins

• Jump to: Jordan Nielsen Weinman Mullenweg Finck Purgason Sodaplay WWFT

Eric Jordan:
There are scenarios where we deal with clients who have tunnel-vision when it comes to usability and it almost always has an impact on the end experience. Sometimes people are so blinded by an article they just read in the latest web design magazine that they forget what the Web is about and it is nearly impossible to get them to budge on certain aspects, and it ends up compromising the original vision of the experience. Those are the unfortunate cases.

In other cases, it is a different story. We are very lucky at 2Advanced to have some very progressive clients, who are willing to try something new which pushes things and doesn’t necessarily comply with all the latest standards. We must remember that the web is a progressive medium, and it must continue to evolve. At one point in time, television was only black & white. It took people with a forward-looking vision to see that it could do more. Eventually, color came. Now we have HDTV, and surround sound. If someone doesn’t push the medium, it will never evolve. If we site back and accept the status quo, nothing will move forward. We MUST push the medium…people and technology will evolve. It will take time, but they will.

Jakob Nielsen:
Soft drinks don't have much of a role on the Web, just as they don't play much of a role in opera. It's a mistake to believe that every medium is equally good for everything. The Web is more suited for problems where you can *do* something, such as home banking or configuring a new car to your preferences.

So of your two examples, cars are the more appropriate one. We know that most new car buyers visit websites before doing to the dealer in order to better understand their options and choices. I don't know what percentage of the purchase decision is determined by the website, but even if it's a small percentage, there are still billions of dollars and euros at stake for car sites.

There's definitely no reason to believe that usability limits the ability of the site to build a car brand. You just have to recognize what aspects of the brand the Web is most suited to promote. Users don't want a site that's just big photos or that focus on trying to push "wow, it's exciting to see this car speed through the desert." That aspect of branding is better left for TV commercials, because that's what they are good at. (Interestingly, one of the things the Web is good at is to have an archive of TV commercials that users can play on demand, thus turning these well-produced mini-videos into actual content instead of being advertising.)

Usability is simply about making things easy, which means to conform to expectations, so that users know how to use the site. It doesn't at all dictate what your content should communicate. One car site might emphasize the safety of the car, while another could emphasize its performance, while a third could highlight the ecological responsibility of driving a hybrid car.

But in all three cases, if you click the button to customize your own car, the controls had better be easy to understand. And, in fact, all three sites probably ought to offer a feature to customize the car, since that's something users have grown to expect. Similarly, as the user proceeds with the customization, each site should provide a running tally of the retail price of the current configuration — again testing shows that users want to see the price change as they work, as opposed to getting the final price at the end.

So yes, usability sets some limits on how you should design the site, but those limits are really set by the users. If you do what users want, you will have more success, and all usability does is to tell you what users want. You can ignore this, but only at the cost of losing users and thus losing business.
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Lynda Weinman:
The term website is such a loose term — conforming or non-conforming to standards is important depending on what type of site you’re creating. An experimental web site design wouldn’t be experimental if it conformed. Story telling is different than information-based communication. The answer to this is totally dependent on what’s been communicated and the objectives of the site. In general, guidelines and standards are good things. It’s often easier to be creative with limitations than to have no limits and push up against nothing.
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Matt Mullenweg:
All of Western music is built off the same 12 notes. Constraints, when embraced, enhance creativity, not hinder it.

Nick Finck:
I am not 100% sure I follow you question. I mean if you are implying that standard usability practices have influenced how we today design and build web pages, sure. Does that mean that every page needs to have the navigation on the left, the same three colors for hyperlinks, and the same types of tabs across the top, no. Is web professional who only knows Flash or malformed HTML forced to learn modernized web standards that are accessible, usable, interoperable, and extensible such as XHTML and CSS for layout, heck yes. I think that if you know the technology well enough you should be able to only limit yourself by simply the limits of your own creativity.

Todd Purgason:
Yes it is limiting, it really depends what your doing, why your doing it and who your doing it for. It makes little since to worry about accessibility for a viral game or video right? It is a rare thing that a tv commercial has been designed to be accessible by some one with severe sight disabilities. However, if your creating content or information based sights it is important to support all groups. I’m a proponent of a site version completely optimized for accessibility and then a separate version that takes complete advantage of the medium to communicate with the non impaired.

Sodaplay:
Design and implementation are not distinct stages at Soda, our processes are more integrated and iterative. Hence usability and accessibility concerns do not simply impact on visual communication and we don’t see the visual aspects as having a monopoly on creativity.

I’m uncertain what the relevance of promoting soft drinks or cars would be to the question, is the assumption that they should be all eye-candy and no functionality? Either way the brands in question may well wish to access the largest possible market share by enabling as many customers as possible to access them.
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WeWorkForThem:
I do not subscribe to the standardization theory but there are rules for sure that can help everyone out. If browsers should all read code the same, that would be a good start. I think conforming to “broad rules” are actually more freeing than a free-for-all. You know what you are dealing with. I think this is more of a problem with the way people see things today and that is a different discussion.