How does real usability work
It just so happened, but lately the author is increasingly beginning to observe debates about the senselessness of investing huge amounts of money in design and UX, which, they say, practically do not pay off. In the heat of disputes, arguments are used that are different, even frankly manipulative: " When your child urgently needs an ambulance, you will not choose her from a photo on the site ... " And so, this article is designed to once and for all refute all rumors about inexpediency and low the economic effect of usability. Simply, usability can be either real engineering or fake trend.
Of course, a separate user experience specialist is completely unnecessary for most companies, just as they don’t need a separate salary expert for rationalization proposals, or a deputy director for infographics. But the very atmosphere of the 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, not only from the illustrator and the artist on the buttons. And even in the ancient and archaic USSR, this was perfectly understood many decades ago.
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For example, on the railway a long time ago there was high-quality effective usability, and it was everywhere. It was just that they were engaged in not beautiful hipsters with macbooks that had come down from the covers of glossy magazines, but simple operators, engineers, technologists, and they were doing this in addition to their main work activity. And for their rationalization proposals they received quite real awards at annual rationalization contests, where they went out not only with beautiful bright slides, but also with a ready calculated economic effect (this is the key phrase of the article).
Why has Railways for a long time tried not to hire the beautiful face of design specialists from the glamorous crowd to fit their needs for various improvements and optimization of technical processes? Yes, because a person’s qualitative understanding of such processes must take years of personal practice or external observations. And only then the necessary wire in the right place was able to give millions of savings on the scale of the entire state corporation, and the proposal to abandon the stations “mice” (still ball, on dirty tables of station operators working rather than 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 time saving (to call the dismantling and cleaning specialist of the waste ball to the station).
We also mention that the author of the article with distrust relates to the emerging experts on solving problems, who, coming to the company from the side and quickly looking around 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 human reason, but I can hardly imagine the level of trust of a major leader in such fleeting experts. Here, take at least the same case with the eternally soiling "mice."
Let's start with the fact that we postulate the idea: 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 her mother at work, see how she is constantly hysterical, knocks the mouse off the table with another accounting journal, as by the evening she already has a joint from many hours of trying to get to the right icon on the screen. It is absolutely certain that there is enough brain of an ordinary schoolchild of the lower grades to watch all this and report: “Mom, here's this little thing that bothers you. Tell me, why not instead of constantly jerking her hand just to press the buttons on the table? " . Just a little observation and sincere love for the mother, no courses on TRIZ and usability seminars are required here.
But would my mother's head and head of his head, upon hearing such advice from a child or even from an adult but an outside expert, throwing headlong under the table and immediately pull the mouse cord out of the system unit? No, of course, because at the moment the economic effect of such advice for him is zero. It is like getting “tips on the run” during regular evening activities with startups in Silicon Valley .
If this same student with a group of engineers and technologists spends a couple of months on proving and substantiating his position, he will calculate the expenses of money, time and diesel fuel, as well as side effects, and provide his mother’s boss (and the one above, and the one above) the document on 200 sheets, where the benefits of introducing his proposal will be spelled out, and the benefits are real, expressed in standard terms: rubles, kilowatts, ton-kilometers, man-hours - then this schoolboy-rationalizer instantly becomes a UX-expert on standing work with user experience. He may not hear anything about Nielsen, the sketch, the macbook, Lebedev, rounding off - but the fact that he has an 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 student can calmly conduct design courses and hold seminars for thousands of dollars until the end of his life.
As I have already said, it is quite difficult for me to imagine an outside Troubler-shooter who spends two or three months of his life, first, to observe and carry out an analysis of the real (not paper-reporting) problem situation, and then another couple of months - on multipage calculation and monetary argumentation effect of its advice. But it is even harder for me to imagine that a real expert Trouble Shooter will initially be hired to find a solution to the pressing problems of a typical operator at a distant station.
“But who needs them, who sees them there in the middle of the taiga?” - about such an attitude to lower ranks as cannon fodder, embedded in our Russian DNA, for several generations will prevent us all from noticing that real work with user experience or improvement customer interactions ALWAYS lies outside sites, buttons and micro-animations. People are always aching joints and children's fears, eternal rush and wandering thoughts, indecision and conflict, fatigue, drowsiness, hunger, resentment at a colleague, stinging a shoe, itchy back, collapsed life plans and a couple of credits on the neck. There would not be a shift of the button a couple of pixels to the left, here it would be with love and care; here it would not be with typical designer snobbery and narcissism - but with a sincere, like the first Christians, desire to help your neighbor, and with the understanding that hasty decisions, like ill-considered good intentions, always lead to hell.
It goes without saying that the desire to observe and help, that love for one’s neighbor and the skill to mathematically justify every sentence are initially characteristic of almost all people, regardless of gender and race (they are typical until the first professional disappointments appear), which is why for the implementation of real usability standards inside from now on you will either have to refer to every employee as “UX guru” as a plus to his main job (well, for trendiness and motivation), or introduce a “soviet” culture offers, rewarding each and every lowest employee for engineering-based multi-million benefits brought to employees or customers, in general - to your business.
And finally, a motivating picture for your designer from the “Are you weak?” Series:
Of course, a separate user experience specialist is completely unnecessary for most companies, just as they don’t need a separate salary expert for rationalization proposals, or a deputy director for infographics. But the very atmosphere of the 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, not only from the illustrator and the artist on the buttons. And even in the ancient and archaic USSR, this was perfectly understood many decades ago.
')
For example, on the railway a long time ago there was high-quality effective usability, and it was everywhere. It was just that they were engaged in not beautiful hipsters with macbooks that had come down from the covers of glossy magazines, but simple operators, engineers, technologists, and they were doing this in addition to their main work activity. And for their rationalization proposals they received quite real awards at annual rationalization contests, where they went out not only with beautiful bright slides, but also with a ready calculated economic effect (this is the key phrase of the article).
Why has Railways for a long time tried not to hire the beautiful face of design specialists from the glamorous crowd to fit their needs for various improvements and optimization of technical processes? Yes, because a person’s qualitative understanding of such processes must take years of personal practice or external observations. And only then the necessary wire in the right place was able to give millions of savings on the scale of the entire state corporation, and the proposal to abandon the stations “mice” (still ball, on dirty tables of station operators working rather than 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 time saving (to call the dismantling and cleaning specialist of the waste ball to the station).
We also mention that the author of the article with distrust relates to the emerging experts on solving problems, who, coming to the company from the side and quickly looking around 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 human reason, but I can hardly imagine the level of trust of a major leader in such fleeting experts. Here, take at least the same case with the eternally soiling "mice."
Let's start with the fact that we postulate the idea: 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 her mother at work, see how she is constantly hysterical, knocks the mouse off the table with another accounting journal, as by the evening she already has a joint from many hours of trying to get to the right icon on the screen. It is absolutely certain that there is enough brain of an ordinary schoolchild of the lower grades to watch all this and report: “Mom, here's this little thing that bothers you. Tell me, why not instead of constantly jerking her hand just to press the buttons on the table? " . Just a little observation and sincere love for the mother, no courses on TRIZ and usability seminars are required here.
But would my mother's head and head of his head, upon hearing such advice from a child or even from an adult but an outside expert, throwing headlong under the table and immediately pull the mouse cord out of the system unit? No, of course, because at the moment the economic effect of such advice for him is zero. It is like getting “tips on the run” during regular evening activities with startups in Silicon Valley .
If this same student with a group of engineers and technologists spends a couple of months on proving and substantiating his position, he will calculate the expenses of money, time and diesel fuel, as well as side effects, and provide his mother’s boss (and the one above, and the one above) the document on 200 sheets, where the benefits of introducing his proposal will be spelled out, and the benefits are real, expressed in standard terms: rubles, kilowatts, ton-kilometers, man-hours - then this schoolboy-rationalizer instantly becomes a UX-expert on standing work with user experience. He may not hear anything about Nielsen, the sketch, the macbook, Lebedev, rounding off - but the fact that he has an 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 student can calmly conduct design courses and hold seminars for thousands of dollars until the end of his life.
As I have already said, it is quite difficult for me to imagine an outside Troubler-shooter who spends two or three months of his life, first, to observe and carry out an analysis of the real (not paper-reporting) problem situation, and then another couple of months - on multipage calculation and monetary argumentation effect of its advice. But it is even harder for me to imagine that a real expert Trouble Shooter will initially be hired to find a solution to the pressing problems of a typical operator at a distant station.
“But who needs them, who sees them there in the middle of the taiga?” - about such an attitude to lower ranks as cannon fodder, embedded in our Russian DNA, for several generations will prevent us all from noticing that real work with user experience or improvement customer interactions ALWAYS lies outside sites, buttons and micro-animations. People are always aching joints and children's fears, eternal rush and wandering thoughts, indecision and conflict, fatigue, drowsiness, hunger, resentment at a colleague, stinging a shoe, itchy back, collapsed life plans and a couple of credits on the neck. There would not be a shift of the button a couple of pixels to the left, here it would be with love and care; here it would not be with typical designer snobbery and narcissism - but with a sincere, like the first Christians, desire to help your neighbor, and with the understanding that hasty decisions, like ill-considered good intentions, always lead to hell.
It goes without saying that the desire to observe and help, that love for one’s neighbor and the skill to mathematically justify every sentence are initially characteristic of almost all people, regardless of gender and race (they are typical until the first professional disappointments appear), which is why for the implementation of real usability standards inside from now on you will either have to refer to every employee as “UX guru” as a plus to his main job (well, for trendiness and motivation), or introduce a “soviet” culture offers, rewarding each and every lowest employee for engineering-based multi-million benefits brought to employees or customers, in general - to your business.
And finally, a motivating picture for your designer from the “Are you weak?” Series:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/298382/
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