Why Gray isn’t Cool…

We’ve gone and made Usability Gray. Black or Gray has long been the color of things that are considered business like, serious or utilitarian. That’s what we’ve made usability out to be.

What is Cool? I asked around, not trusting my own instincts - definitions of Cool abound, as varied as the people you ask – cool is fun to use, modern, cutting edge design, advanced features, convenient and flexible, aesthetically pleasing design , comfortable shape, size, emotionally appealing etc.

By contrast, ask people what they think Utilitarian is – the common perception is that something utilitarian is functional, does the job, works well, plain, simple, no frills, useful, necessary.

See what I mean? Useful, plain simple, functional – isn’t that how we have been defining Usable? We never made efforts to convince people that Usable is Cool and that usability can lead to enjoyable or fun user experiences. Nope – we had to make it gray and utilitarian..

When we pushed the concept that utility was ease of use, we forgot that man does not live by Utility alone – once the basic need has been satisfied, we raise our expectations and ask for more – remember Maslow’s good ol’ Hierarchy of Needs?

What has happened here? Why isn’t fun to use equated to being Usable? How did Usability get stuck with a stodgy utilitarian label while fun/delightful gets the coveted “cool” label? - If a gadget is fun to use, it moves to the realm of “cool”. Why doesn’t Usable convey the sense of fun to use? Why isn’t usable considered cool? We look at the iPod mini – and the reaction - wow. cool. No one thinks of it as “Usable”.

When was the last time you looked at the nifty gadgets sold in Best Buy or Circuit City, and think.. mmmm – that’s Usable.??? It’s more likely you were drooling over how slick and ‘cool’ the gadget was, not how usable all of its features are.

If we were to conduct a study regarding all the features that are provided in a typical high end video recorder or camera, collecting information on “likelihood of use” – we would find that the percentage of “high probability” of use features is very small. Most of the features provided will rarely, or never be used and are more than likely hard to use – but that does not prevent the gadget from being considered cool or sexy. So what does this tell us?

The perception of Coolness transcends it's utility and usability. So – even if we design the “invisible” features (low probability of use features) to be very difficult to use and made sure that the high probability of use items were fairly usable, we would still be able to preserve the perception of the gadget as cool.

What about shape, weight, color and form factor and finish? How much do they influence the perception? In a piece of hardware, these attributes convey it’s physical characteristics – only a few of these attributes make it to the software world where many of these are virtual attributes. But that’s another topic altogether and we will deal with it another article.

We've done this to ourselves. Go back to all the postulates from the internet Usability gurus over the last several years – all of them have been stressing utility and efficiency as the keys to Usability – but those are the qualities that are associated with infrastructure and utilities. A commodity offering that is necessary, but preferably in the background and out of sight. Cool is something to show off and be seen with – the exact opposite of utilitarian.

Oh, I am sure there were very good reasons for the recommendations then - at that point in the life of the internet, the bandwidth limitations and the limits imposed by hardware such as memory and processor speeds forced us to take the "utilitarian" approcah - but is such a philosophy warranted even now?

How do we get away from the "graying" of Usability? The crux of the problem is not that marketers don't accept the fact that usability can sell a product; or that Usability in products and software is an attribute that is desirable, worth investing in and and seen as a competitive marketing weapon?

It's just that usability by itself isn't attractive or desirable to consumers - it has to be balanced with the other attributes of the product, attributes that are more easily acknowledged as contributing to the perceived "coolness" - materials used, size, shape, color, features etc. Companies know that all these attributes can be present, and the product can still fail badly, if it does not provide the functionality promised.

However, a product can be cool even if it barely meets the Functionality test - can we not make a case that basic functionality is no longer enough, and that users expectations should be set much highter?

No product or software can be considered well designed if it does not exhibit optimality of functional design. Usability is optimal functionality - ie, the product not only does what it is supposed to, but does it in a way that meets or exceeds the expectations of its user. Thus, usability is a key component of good design, and should be treated as such, and should not have to take second place to any other attribute.

If we succeed in raising the bar of what "functional" should really be, then the definitions of design will be re-written, and the enhanced expectations will spur the market for well designed (read highly usable) products and software.

* for more on design and utility, see John Pile's classic work - Design: Purpose, Form, and Meaning; ISBN: 0870232576 Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, U.S.A.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 203pp. You can find a decent used copy on Alibris.com quite cheaply :)
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