The guru of web usability

"He's also the man that some web designers love to hate. In particular, they love to heap abuse on his website - UseIt.com."

Here's a Guardian interview with the guru himself, Jakob Nielsen.

But first, a digression.

I like lists. So much that I have lists upon lists. Lists for everything. Lists of life goals, lists of tasks...really long lists of tasks. Then, people send me lists via email (usually more tasks). Those lists get added to my other lists. Then I have Outlook making lists for me everytime I flag something. So I have paper and Outlook lists. Then I go home and I have sheaves and sheaves of paper detailing tasks, things to do around the house, chore schedules, future goals, places to visit, websites to revisit, books to read, films to rent, errands to run, food shopping lists....etc.

Then I found this web application....

In one of my fits of internet browsing, I came across 37signals, an ingenious little company that makes ingenious little applications. I now have my own ta da list (which is a compilation of to do lists). I tried to share a list with both my brother (with whom I must collaborate on a number of house projects) and another one with a client. To my dismay, neither appear to have looked at the lists. Prior to finding Ta Da, I used "now do this", which is a very simple program that allows you to put in your tasks for the day and click the "done" button when you're done, until you uni-task your way through. However, after a couple of days I found that now-do-this was too simple. In fact, if you accidentally close your browser you lose your whole list and you're left thinking, now don't do that, stupid program. So, not functional enough.

I am waiting to see what the pick up is on the Ta Da to do lists before I introduce my client to Highrise or Basecamp. However, both of these web apps could be just what our small, minimally staffed, frequently travelling dance company needs.

Which brings us back to the issue of web usability. What does that mean, anyway? Well, from what I understand from 37signals and Jakob Nielsen (see his retro-looking site), it refers to web interfaces: web design, not graphic design.

Some interfaces work, some don't. We all know this intuitively. Like many semi-sophisticated web users, I do have some basic programming skills, I started a blog in 2000, I use dictionary.com, I get a lot of my news online, google is my best friend....I am loyal to good sites and don't both with bad ones.

From the point of view of the 'user', websites provide a service.
How well they provide that service is a question of their 'usability'.

A real time, enfolding as I write this, example of web usability:
My dear colleague Douglas, despite wearing two watches on his left wrist like a character in Alice in Wonderland, has somehow mistaken the departure time for his daughter's bus trip up to camp. This, he now claims, is the fault of the website. He could not find the departure time of the bus, and when he did find it, it was buried in many other numbers and dates so he mixed it up with some other time.

I just went to the website to find the relevant page and link it for our reference but...I couldn't find it. Disastrous!

Now, Camp Big Canoe is a very small organization that services a limited number of people. But any time you go to a website and get fed up that you can't find what you want, anytime a website drives you crazy by hiding the most important information behind layers of click, anytime they frustrate you as you try to: find a schedule; book a ticket; do a search; find a phone number; donate money; send an email-- they are crippling the functionality of the internet, wasting our time and their own money in the process.

I have gone to a website before, felt confused or irritated, and left right away. I no longer go to those websites (ie. nowdothis.com).

Anyhow, those issues are top of mind because since working for NetGain I have been responsible for generating content for one website and designing two others from scratch. Any sites you love lately or have been forced to use?

Why best practices for business are useless for the arts

In the area of non-profit cultural enterprise, we are accustomed to having government and commercial institutions talking down to us. Through our boards of directors and funding relationships we are fed a continuous stream of "best practices," usually about five years after they've lost favour in the sector that spawned them. From industries that failed to anticipate rising fuel prices and from governments that can't run a gun registry, we get scandalously bad practices from scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells who oblige us to adopt them uncritically just to get along.

Examples? The Harvard planning model and the SWOT analysis are techniques that only work for organizations that have sufficient resources to do really solid research, analysis, and who can employ the relevant conclusions with enough process integrity to produce a result that offers better than average prospects of success. Those preconditions disqualify about 90% of the non-profits arts organizations that have been employing those methods to satisfy the business people on their boards, as well as the public and private sector funders on whom they depend.

Another great example is a study done by a well-meaning management consulting firm that tried to draw lessons from the airline industry for the performing arts. Their results were published and widely quoted for a brief time in the late '80's or early '90's. They noted, as Julia did in reference to Godin's article, that both industries offer time-bound products, so they both faced the same supply-demand, pricing, and inventory management dilemmas.

There, in my mind, the similarity ended and I recall little of interest in the study's findings. But how could the world's most credentialed multinational consulting firm fail to observe the fundamental differences between these enterprises? Even a lay analyst would conclude that these differences spoil all but the narrowest and least valuable analogies between them.

One industry is well capitalized, with a highly trained, unionized workforce and a high degree of price elasticity in most market segments. The other was never capitalized, always operates out of cash flow, has a transient workforce in all but the largest companies, and can charge only enough for its tickets to recapture a fraction of its operating and production costs. Can you guess which the airline industry is and which is the theatre industry in Canada?

One is faced with intense competition with others in its industry group, however customers have no real alternative to purchasing from one or another of that group. The other industry competes not only with others in the same category; it competes with all other leisure activities for the spare time and disposable income of its customers. Again, can you tell which one is which?

For anyone who wishes to maintain that there is a profound resemblance between the airline industry and the commercial theatre industry (as opposed to nonprofits), I have two responses, either one of which should decide the matter. First, most of the performing arts activities in Canada is nonprofit, not commercial, and even the commercial activity depends on the broad base of subsidized nonprofit activity beneath it for its audience and talent development. Second, airlines and theatres are not even time-bound in the same way, which was the primary point of comparison, after all. Anyone who has arrived a few minutes after the curtain has gone up at the theatre, or a few minutes after boarding has ended at the airport, can tell you that it is infinitely easier to be shown to your seat at the theatre than it is to sprint with your baggage down the runway, grasping for the landing gear. They are fundamentally different enterprises that operate in completely different circumstances, all of which affect the ways in which they market their products and manage their inventories.

People in business and government are always trying to share their wisdom with the arts, even though their own performance often puts that wisdom in doubt, and even though the techniques they offer may be unsuited to the practical realities of the arts enterprise.

Photo credit: Corex