Design, Usability, Desirability, What’s The Difference?
The issue used to be: “Here is something we wish we could do, but gosh, how do you do it?” Now, more often it is, “Here is something we could do; would it be desirable?”
—The Trouble With Computers Thomas K. Landauer, p130. (©1995 Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Formal usability tests in a lab setting are an excellent tool to evaluate whether users can complete tasks; however, the technique has not been as effective for measuring intangible aspects of the user experience such as “fun,” “enjoyment,” or whether the product is desirable enough to purchase.
—Measuring Desirability: New methods for evaluating desirability in a usability lab setting Joey Benedek and Trish Miner (©2000 Microsoft)
Desirability design is about expanding on the idea of what human factors are. I choose not to describe it as pushing the cutting edge, because rarely is it about ambitious programming or product design. Often what is desirable has little to do with an ambitious technology implementation at all.
Here’s an example from a cash register receipt of a famous national computer retail chain …" NO REFUND OF EXCHANGE AFTER 14 DAYS …NO REFUND WITHOUT ORIGINAL RECEIPT … A 15% OPEN BOX FEE WILL BE CHARGED FOR OPENED ITEMS …SPECIAL RESTRICTIONS FOR REFUNDS IN EXCESS OF $250.00 AND REFUNDS MADE TO CREDIT CARDS …SEE BACK FOR FULL DETAILS" (Edited for brevity). First, keep in mind you usually look at the receipt when there is a problem. In other words the very instance when a store’s commitment to customer satisfaction is put to the test. Second, every statement written in caps is clear, understandable—ergo usable. And third, why not rewrite it We will refund or exchange within 14 days?
You might think a computer retailer could communicate how computers empower more desirable options, not limit them. Surely empowerment fits the hype about technology. But mostly what we have experience with is what computers don’t allow us to do. The reservation system which takes your reservation, but will not hold your reservation. The inventory management system detecting your package is delayed, which does not empower anyone to expedite it. Scheduling programs allowing you to list a meeting, not control how time is spent in meetings. And Web sites which look the same, talk the same, do the same.
Although standards and usability are a favorite excuse, there is something missing.
A Certain X Factor
Companies that once obsessed over how to engineer new products must now also obsess over how to reverse–engineer the desires of their consumers. This is more than just a matter of market research. It is fundamental to every decision you make.
—Reverse–Engineering Desire
By Jeffrey F. Rayport
To contrast design, usability and desirability, take a simple phone. A designer might concentrate on slick styling, custom ring tones, or building in a clock and answering machine. A usability professional can perform a task analysis to make the design more manageable. Desirability–based design would have the phone emit a disconnected signal only telemarketing autodialers detect. The computer then marks the number disconnected in its database, decreasing telemarketing calls. Many users desire fewer interruptions more than the latest fads.
When desirability is neglected we get gadgets like the internet toaster. It fetched the weather report and browned a graphic representation onto your bread. As usable as any toaster, and certainly a tribute to ingenuity if not desirability. Usability can demotivate users …but desirability design is about motivation itself.
Usability can be mistaken for protecting software and products from the Dümster Anzunehmender User or “stupidest user ever imagined.” Such developers run the risk of testing user habituation rather than developing a clear idea of what is desirably usable for customers.
Users don’t desire to feel stupid by using products. Users who are made to feel smart can transcend habituation if innovative products are desirable enough to balance a learning curve.
Studies reveal emotion informs thoughtful attention. Users are particularly smart, informed and thoughtful about those things they care about and desire. As Jeffrey Rayport puts it companies “reverse–engineer the desires of their consumers”. Desirability design techniques supply the X Factor which motivates users to make usability matter.
Usability Recognizes Desirability Design
A user’s personal experience trumps anything the designer is trying to communicate. In talking about a design's “look and feel,” feel wins every time. …We need much better methods for testing enjoyable aspects of user interfaces.
—Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 7, 2002: User Empowerment and the Fun FactorMost people tend to kid themselves that languages are chosen for technical reasons. Languages are chosen for social reasons and justified for technical reasons. No one genuinely picks a given language for purely technical reasons. Maybe you’re tired of using C, or you're tired of using Cobol. You want to use the next language. It looks cool. You want to pad out your resume. You want to future proof yourself.
—Choosing Languages for Social Reasons; Human–Oriented Architecture A Conversation with Luke Hohmann, Part III by Bill Venners
Nielsen’s (useit.com) Alertbox for July 7, 2002 acknowledges the era of “Joy of Use” is upon us. Usability realized there can be frictions in task completion. Desirability acknowledges frictions imply motivations to reach larger objectives. Apparently users have to want to use something in order for usability to work. Increasing desire for use complements ease of use nicely, the question is how.
Coke has gone head to head with Pepsi with a product that taste tests say is inferior, and Coke is still the number one soft drink in the world. … This story is a good illustration of how complicated it is to find out what people really think.
— Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
A tool set out in Geoffrey A. Moore’s Crossing The Chasm (1991, Harper Business) should be familiar to interaction designers: personas and scenarios. While typical market profiles are not specific enough for design, what Moore lays out is quite different. First you put yourself into the persona’s context. A real situation with real objectives and concerns. Then lay out a dilemma scenario which would justify purchasing the product. On page 96, Moore points out why this happens so rarely “The broader implication here is that most marketing teams fail right at the beginning. They do not personalize their image of the market but go straight to some set of abstractions or number. What gets lost in the process, as we shall see, is any clear insight into the compelling reason to buy.”
In Gladwell’s book Blink, the examples of New Coke and Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair are examples where market research turns up short. The BusinessWeek article The Onliness of Strong Brands explains “…If you apply straight-line metrics to ideas like these, you get a resounding “no-go”. The trick is to evaluate ideas the way a designer would, by matching the customer reactions to previous success patterns.”
We can adequately run the numbers. With a tool for bridging cultures of business, technology and design, we can exchange the information driving the numbers. I call it desirability design. Less marketing line items than interaction design holism. Less about vision or the killer app, more about death from a thousand cuts, mostly self–inflicted.
Resources
- Why Usability is the Path To Failure explains the limits of usability. Usability is about demotivators and frictions in task completion, where desirability design is about motivators and incentives for tasks. Forrester has just discovered as much with Desirable Online Experiences: Taking Web Sites Beyond Useful And Usable
- Why do organizations have such a poor return on their R&D investments? Peter P. Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa call it Inventoritis Exposed:The Missing Bridge Between Marketing and Engineering. It’s the classic realization that invention is different from innovation. While others puzzle over the symptoms and the diagnosis, the cure is desirability design.
- The Rise and Fall of Homo Logicus is a discussion of technologist culture, and why programmers don’t think like users or designers. Due to the myth of the stupid user, usability can devolve into simplicity rather than the elegant sophistication which complements desirability design.
- Engineers are people tackles the taboo subject of emotions in the workplace. “As an engineer, you have to look at emotions and other people issues as just another set of skills for your toolbox.” Choosing Languages for Social Reasons explains desirability drives even computer architecture.
- This dicussion of decision theory is interesting. Information is about decisions, and information work is about understanding decision making. How You Feel Drives How You Choose shows how the affective design of desirability fits into decision making.
- When making a camera for children to use, good usability can lead to poor desirability (and a lot of ruined film). It can be argued the Hipster PDA is the most usable on the market. Perhaps the better argument is usability has its limits.
- ArtRage takes the ideas of Kai and Kansei to heart. Making good use of such UI wonkery as pie menus, the interface encourages exploration. ArtRage painting tools demonstrate how certain media interact with each other on the canvas.
- The standard way to organize books is by author, subject, or title. The premise is as long as users know what they want, and are explicit enough and logical enough, the system is said to be intuitive. Someone going on vacation may want an easy but unpredictable read, with a suitable sense of optimism. The interface of Whichbook.net offers desire centered sliders, by mood. You get simplicity, sophisticated user insight and user experience design, not controls set by functional requirements of database structure. Moodlogic offers credits to those creating the profiles such systems require.
- Using a web–based game, MIT professor Drazen Prelec can reveal understanding, desirability, and an information map for customer centered product improvement. Techniques like customer or user focus groups have their problems. Prelec’s Information Pump (view a PDF file here) is designed to get beneath opinions to the information (the often missing affective component of information, desirability).
- Kansei is also known as emotional usability, affective design or hedonics, and falls under the category of desirability. The success of products like the Mazda Miata are attributed in large part to kansei engineering.
- How do you create a kiosk for eyeglass selection when customers use classifications like plain, young, glamourous, sporty or natural? What are the design specs for achieving a "natural" look in eyeglasses? Builders of the Mikissimes Design System turned up 60 words customers use in combination to describe a universe of some 30,000 styles. One key to customer satisfaction was how the eyeglass rim conformed to the curve of the eyebrow. This was the parameter which differed most amongst customers. What differs least gets more attention in most designs.
- Usability Glossary: habituation. Malcome Gladwell’s Blink explained the success of the Aeron comes from The Onliness of Strong Brands “If you apply straight-line metrics to ideas like these, you get a resounding “no–go”. The trick is to evaluate ideas the way a designer would, by matching the customer reactions to previous success patterns.”
- Marc Hassenzahl, Andreas Beu, and Michael Burmester present new approaches which go beyond usability to hedonic quality issues. Their paper, Engineering Joy ranks hedonics with usability and utility in evaluating software quality. View the PDF file for Engineering Joy.
- Microsoft’s Desirability Toolkit. From a correspondence with Joey Benedek, “Trish Miner and myself developed the tool originally to be an addition to standard usability testing and definitely not a replacement. We felt that we (usability community) were doing a good job of measuring if a product was usable (can users complete tasks, task completion time etc) but not a great job of measuring whether people actually liked the product or felt it was truly desirable to use. The toolkit does a great job of this and is far superior to “targeted Likert scales” which can bias(we define the anchors) and be used in an “automated fashion” (users always picking 4 or 7). The Toolkit has blossomed into a tool that we use not just in lab testing but in other research techniques like field research and focus groups.” Measuring Desirability: New methods for evaluating desirability in a usability lab setting DesirabilityToolkit.doc
- Emotion And Decision explains the emotional basis of attention and decision making. Emotional Design By Donald A. Norman “Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability go hand–in–hand in good design.”
- Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, July 7, 2002 Usability will not save an undesirable product, site or service. In a world of plenty, demand is the scarcest resource of all. Attention and desire are the new scarce resources in an era of unprecedented product availability and technical know how.
- Cash registers can output a record of purchase which is also a shopping list for the next trip based on data the store is already collecting. Restaurants can aid customers who are splitting a bill. Walgreens, by listing the 7 service basics on the receipt but not informing employees about them, inflicts a common sort of desirability damage on itself.
- The Internet Toaster has, from what I can tell, good usability and clever design. And yet, there is still something missing. And here’s another article on the limits of usability. When all is said and done, you can only make those netlinked refrigerator magnets so usable. At some point you have to ask is this product desirable?
