Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS

SP: Let's talk about usability testing. Why is it so important? And to play devil's advocate, doesn't it take the expertise out of being a good designer?

Hmm. If you believe in the sense of "genius design," that people can innately just create something amazing -- and there are genius designers out there, like Steve Jobs, then you could be seen as saying that usability might stifle that genius design.

But for the 99% of designers out there who aren't these Galileo or Leonardo da Vinci-style genius designers, design is a really useful design tool. And I think one of the problems with the perception of usability testing is that most people's experiences with it is as a summative testing that's done by big agencies at the end of the project. And they tack the word "test" on it, and it makes us designers feel like our work is being tested and graded somehow, and if you fail the test then you're bad designers.

It's terrible, because it makes us designers feel like we're living in this kind of "checkbox" mentality. The kind of usability testing that I favour is called formative testing, and it's using usability testing as a design tool. You know, we can't just sit in our little isolated boxes staring at Photoshop all day, creating experiences in isolation, and believe that the experiences we're creating are going to be usable and perfect. Because experience shows that once you put something out there, people will always use devices in a way that you never expected. And people will find frustration in things in ways that you could never expect.

I think one of the big problems is that clients and employers feel that you've hired a designer, and they should be geniuses, and they should get things right the first time. And frankly, if you hire a company like Clearleft or Adaptive Path, that first iteration is going to be really good -- it's going to be much better than if you had hired somebody who doesn't understand about usability and user experience. But you never, ever get it right the first time. And good designers understand that design is about process, and usability is a really important tool to educate design. So I do think that usability is a design tool. You sit down, as a good designer, you see clients or users use the products that you're designing. When you see that they're struggling with a particular situation, or they don't understand something, you get these "light bulb moments", and it informs your design decisions. So then you can go back, and iterate, and do better and better. And the more time you spend in usability tests, watching users use your products, the better a designer you'll be. And I do think there's a certain amount of arrogance to think that you're a genius designer and not have to worry about how users use your stuff.

So I see usability as a design tool. But then, I see design as Design with a capital D -- I think design means designing the system, the architecture, the user flow, the information, the visual interface, the templates ... it's not just the graphic side of things. You've got to get all of that right, and all of that is meta-design.

SP: The bio on your site mentions Flash. How does your experience working with Flash influence how you design these days with HTML, CSS and JavaScript?

Oh, does it? Crikey! Yes, quite amazingly I used to be quite a hardcore Flash person. Not so much a designer, but I was quite a hardcore ActionScript programmer. And I was out there back in 2000, building object-oriented Flash games in ActionScript 4. But I started to get a little bit disillusioned with the Flash world, because at the time the experiences people were building were not very usable, they were not very accessible, and I discovered this brave new world of web standards, and it just made so much sense to me. So I slowly started moving away from Flash and into the world of web standards, which is kind of a strange transition I guess -- I don't know any of my standards colleagues who have done that.

But on the other hand, weirdly, it's starting to come full circle. I don't do any Flash stuff these days at all, but if you look at Flex, and you look at ActionScript ... basically ActionScript is ECMAScript, which is a standard. Flash uses MXML as a declarative markup language, so friends of mine like Aral Balkan, who do Flex development, are writing Flex in a markup language, using CSS, very similarly to HTML.

So it's interesting to see how a standards-based approach is being adopted by the Flash and Flex world.

SP: The reason I mentioned it is because I was wondering whether you missed the freedom that a lot of Flash designers feel like they have over a markup-based solution?

I think that design is all about constraints. Some people love the blank canvas situation, but I don't at all. I think that's really for artists, not designers. I think design is all about constraints -- business constraints, technology constraints. And it's those constraints that actually create the innovation.

And if it wasn't for those constraints, we wouldn't have all of these cool CSS effects, or all of these cool JavaScript libraries. So no, I don't think it's a problem so much. However I am increasingly interested in user experience design, and I do see the limitations of HTML and CSS and JavaScript. And yeah, I am starting to peek at some of these experiences that Flash developers are building now, and think it would be nice to have some of that flexibility -- but with the accessibility and the markup benefits, and the openness of HTML.

So it's not something I will ever do again -- I'm over the Flash thing. But it's interesting, yeah.

SP: You revealed Silverback to the world the other day. Tell us a bit about this application.

Yeah, sure. I've been doing this little world tour of usability workshops, partly because I think that usability testing is the way forward. The whole concept of Silverback was as a way for designers and developers to do really low-cost, guerrilla usability testing.

There's a whole bunch of different software solutions out there which are quite expensive -- in the region of US $1,500, and they're good but they're really feature-heavy and quite difficult to use. So we decided to create Silverback, which essentially captures screen activity, mouse clicks, stuff the user is typing in, audio, and video, as a way of doing really cheap low-cost usability testing.