The Brave New World: Usability Challenges of Web 2.0 - Jared Spool

Jared Spool is, without a doubt, one of the top usability researchers in the history of usability research. If it’s been built on a computer, he’s probably tested it. Now, Jared, and researchers like him, are faced with a new beast: Web 2.0. Jared knows Web 2.0 is much more than a fad, and he gives us ideas on how to make it usable.

The entire role of the usability professional is to eliminate the frustration caused by the introduction of technology. If you’ve used something, be it a website or a toaster, and you can’t for the life of you figure it out, you know the frustration felt by most users of most products firsthand.

When 37signals asked its users what Web 2.0 is, they got answers ranging from "Marketing buzzword" to "mainly AJAX" to "AJAX and interactive applications." Jared believes Web 2.0 is really "small pieces, loosely joined." These small pieces include APIs, RSS, and folksonomies.

Design mutates: it lives a lifecycle. First, technology design focuses on getting the technology to actually work. It moves next to feature design, or providing "extras" that make the design worthwhile. Finally, technology design moves to experience design. Literally, you move from "just get it working," to "add features," to "build an experience," or commoditizing your design. (Design here is a rough term encompassing any innovation, from a computer, to a website, to a stereo).

Web 2.0 is:

• Designed around user experiences
• "Small pieces, loosely joined
• A set of common design attributes:
  • APIs (mash-ups)
  • RSS
  • Folksonomies
  • Social Networking (the "Wisdom of Crowds" or, as Wired Magazine likes to put it "Crowdsourcing")

These lead to some unique usability challenges for Web 2.0: APIs make everyone a designer, while RSS has no defined experience.

APIs’ Challenges

• How do we assess the usability of an API?
• How do we create a seamless experience with code from different sources? (And, believe me, if you’ve ever tried to select, and work with, the best AJAX library out there, you know it’s more difficult and time consuming than brain surgery).
• What happens when everyone is designing interfaces?
• How do we ensure design skills are available to new experience designers?

RSS Challenges

• Can we come up with a way to explain how RSS works? (Ask your Mom and Dad what it does and see how well the current explanation is spreading, if it’s spreading at all).
• Subscribing is complex (even with services like Bloglines).
• Interactions are unpredictable (one day, my Yahoo! UI blog feed mysteriously stopped working for no real reason I could ever discern).

How do we properly communicate how to tag? On social tagging sites, like Flickr and del.icio.us, we face the "Kitchen Cabinet Problem", the same problem you face when you’re visiting a friend’s house, and find yourself searching for the kitchen garbage can: you know where you put your things, but not where other people put theirs.

Folksonomies have an inherent challenge: there are a lot of different ways to say the same thing.

Taking Netflix as an example of social networking, we run into a big challenge: how do we boot one of our friends out of our social network? If your buddy keeps recommending horrible movies, how do you politely remove him from your network circle? Social systems, be they real-world or online, are really complex.

The long tail or behavior pattern was applied to a large collection of books. Looking at most frequently used words, "and" and "the" showed up most often, with less-common words making up the tail. This same behavior predicts the popularity of web pages on a site: there’s a few popular pages that everyone hits, with views trickling down the tail, and finally winding up on that press release from March 18th, 1992. Microsoft’s site has over 800,000 pages that have never been seen. Even by spiders. The long tail challenge forces us question how we can write interfaces that support the 2% of users that do their own thing.

[this is a ranom point -ajm]: Experience design is affected by bugs in the data. [Other peoples' notes seem to be saying, as best as I can sum up, that bad data causes a bad experience: if your bank AJAXes your account information to you and it's incorrect, you'll have a negative experience regardless of the site's design. Design is now just one factor, sometimes, with some interfaces a very passive factor, in a user's overall experience].

Finally, Jared stated that Web 2.0 has momentum. It’s not a fad, and is certainly more than a buzzword. In fact, I really think that it’s the experience revolution, the set of seamless experiences, that the Web has been waiting for. If not, it’s certainly more than rounded corners, pastel colors, and the permanent beta.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 8:41 pm and is filed under learn, ux week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.