Usability or Anti-usability?

I've been running into the same brick wall for a while, from both a developer's perspective and as a user. There's some big fallacies propagating amongst people who think they know what usability is. Now I'm not going to claim to be an expert, I know more then I did a few years ago when I first encountered the area as part of my formal studies and had a pretty contemptible view of it.

And that's the first trap: a little knowledge is dangerous. If you don't know enough to know how much you don't know, you're never going to be able to make progress.

WARNING! the rest of the article looks at the holy wars surrounding Gnome and phpBB. I'm not presenting an argument for either side of these contentious issues, but looking for ways round the ideolgical issues that cause this kind of stalemate.

This brings me to the first case study, and I'm going to try and concentrate on the social and usability side rather than technicalities. I've been involved in the web presence of a few university societies for a number of years now, and been part of the journey from a few pages of html to a complex Content Management System and watched myself get it wrong completely on numerous occasions. Here's the latest:

I chose to migrate from a few pages of html linking to a wiki and to a phpBB forum, to a Drupal based site, after watching efforts at building a home-grown solution collapse die to issues with the starting point, phpBB. Whilst a reasonably simple and widely used forum, it was not desigend to be extended, and as soon as a security update for phpBB came out, half the work had to be redone.

After a year of running the drupal site, which saw far more activity than the previous sites, the newly elected committee suddenly declare a free hosted phpBB service as the prototype new website, completely unaware of the reasons why we'd abandoned both hosted forum services and phpBB. The resulting discussion quickly spirals towards holy war, until there's a diplomatic message about exploring possibilities due to poor 'useability' of the site. I jump for joy at this point because I hope there's some useful feedback at long last.

Of course further probing mostly gets repeats of the buzzword until I work out which users didn't like the site and why. They were new members of the society and mostly unaware of everything that went on within the society. The resulting answers related to the culture shock of of using something that didn't look like phpBB 2 or it's lookalikes, the oft repeated mindset being it's used on all the other sites I've joined so this is the right thing for us to use.

The second issue was the way in which the content of the left sidebar changed intelligently according to where you were in the site, and was crammed with irrelevant information like upcoming events and the most recently posted items. This perplexed me some as they were what many of the users I had spoken to liked most about the site.

Further dialogue saw requests for having a forum separate to the rest of the site, and to get of the sidebar because phpBB didn't have one. This is where the alarm bells really started ringing in my head.

One of the biggest problems of having a separate forum is it quickly becomes the only place users look for information and often the only place users are aware exists. People who put a lot of work into making information available in other areas of the site were shot down by users demanding that it be available or at least linked to on the forum. The first attempts at getting round this, adding a sidebar to the phpBB site containing upcoming events and links to other areas of the site were largely successful, but were a pain in the ass to maintain and modify.

As for phpBB not needing a sidebar, the users were perfectly right about that. A few links at the top of each page were all that phpBB needed, but as soon as more features were added, more menus were needed and putting all options in the primary links at the top meant an overcrowded menu.

My second case study is much shorter, but part of a bigger holy war. Gnome vs. KDE (or Gnome vs. user choice as there are approaches other than KDE). I'll say now that I use both.

This Tombuntu article describes how to enable the advanced file permissions in Nautilus, fixing one of my long-term gripes about Gnome treating me like an idiot.

The ease of changing this setting, and more importantly the ease of discovering how to make this change is not something I'm impressed with. It requires delving into gconf-editor and tweaking settings or using a command line tool to do the same. Easy to do if you know how, but very hard to discover. Again we run into the fallacy that features and usability are mutually exclusive.

To summarise, the traps that we fall into in the name of usability are

• Assuming the most common solution is the best solution
• Assuming the best way to remedy a usability problem with a feature is to remove it
• Punishing the users that expect a little more functionality with a lot less usability
• Assuming there's only one way to solve a problem

For the most part users that demand more functionality are used to putting up with usability sacrifices, and often this trade-off works. Where it falls apart is in dealing with a broad spectrum of users.

Here's how I'm working on solving the issues with the society website:

• Making some minor theme tweaks so the forum area of the site looks less alien and closer to that of phpBB, reducing the shock of using something totally different.
• Separating the sidebar menu into a number of clearly delimited boxes, so it appears to be a number of small menus rather than one big one
• Setting the informative but non-essential sidebar blocks like 'recent posts' to being off by default, but allowing users to enable them from their account settings page.

As for the gnome issue, it is my opinion the best place to put the option of using the advanced file permission dialog inside of the Edit->Preferences menu in nautilus, it's certainly the first place I looked for the option.

At the end of the day finding the solution to the problems involves tearing down the walls between every set of 'us' and 'them' and trying to learn more rather than relying on just our own knowledge to solve problems. None of us are right all the time, and I'm sure someone, probably Tim, will notice where my own assertions contradict each other.