You asked this question, “So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design?” I have never experienced being in the limelight simply for being in this field. It’s amazingly hard work to consult with closed-minded people or to travel constantly to cover field studies to gather data while listening to first-hand complaints from users that the performance of the system is frustrating. It’s exhausting to work with developers who are on fire to put you in your place because you try to help them do their jobs. It takes years to prove your worth in this field as it did for my usability team. So, if you hear someone being lauded in this field, they most likely earned it. Recently I heard one of our project managers say, “If I don’t have usability on a project I’m putting it in as a project risk right away”, I sincerely hope any others in our department within earshot did not assume we have a cushy and well liked job.

You opined, “Usability is not a strategy for design success. The efficiency you create in your interface will be copied almost instantaneously by your competitors.” If a competitor copies what we’ve done, that would be their first mistake. You see, different products have different users with different needs (the challenge is determining those needs carefully). Most of the users in our company work remotely at client sites (could be a client warehouse, basement or storage closet). Their needs would be different than those sitting at the same desk each day. How do you optimize a design for specific users? What if our users don’t use a mouse because they may not have the desk space in a closet? Do you design for heavy keyboard usage, great! But what if our users are mature and do not have much experience with hot keys? How do we design the UI to accommodate this? The solution must come from using usability methods. User research from field studies, conceptual inquiry (usability methods) and task analysis get us the patterns (I think you may have been referring to patterns as minutia)? Anyway, here is a link to read about the value of patterns. http://humanfactors.com/downloads/whitepapers.asp#UIpatterns

Another thought of yours, “It can’t compel people to be interested in interacting with your product or service. It can’t make you compelling or really differentiate you from other organizations.” I agree with this thought if I understand this correctly. I recently experienced a vendor trying to sell their solution to integrate into our own. They continued to state they focused on usability… blah, blah, blah. But the proof was in the numbers. We had our stakeholders, representative users and our usability team fill out a scorecard to rate how well they achieved each task scenario (another usability method). It was proven that their tool in fact had additional steps and a hierarchical navigation that was difficult to remember. So, our usability team did not just choose a product because we get “gold stars” .

Your closing comment, “Or put another way, there’s only so far you can get by streamlining the shopping cart on your website.” How do you know that? I realize this is another opinion, but it sounds like you have a reason for this statement. But please read this HFI white paper about Staples.com. http://humanfactors.com/downloads/whitepapers.asp#keepingusers

Last is that I am a photographer too. I learned all of the “ancient” techniques when studying for my BFA. For instance, controlled temperatures and timing must be “dead on” for color prints. When loading your own film by hand in complete darkness it can be tricky. Don’t overdevelop your film as it will result in prints with a flat tone – not visually appealing. Artists using the photograph as a medium talk a lot about how well an image has been processed and developed. Artists are very good at recognizing the poorly executed techniques and will be the first to keep other artists in line (we hate laziness and sloppy work).

Again, thank you for the opinions!
Dawn Barber