Jesse James Garret on usability (and eBay)

The web site e-consultancy recently conducted an interview with Jesse James Garrett, the man who coined the term 'Ajax' and president of Adaptive Path. It’s a great interview and I wanted to highlight some of the things he said. First, on usability…

Usability doesn’t really get at the psychological and emotional context of use. Usability will tell you, from an ergonomic perspective, what people can do with a product, but there is lot more to making a product successful in the marketplace and making a product feel successful in people’s minds. Often, we find that clients come to us, thinking they have a usability problem, but it turns out that their products are pretty usable. The reason that the product is falling short is it is not satisfying an emotional or psychological need.

That is a philosophy that I wish can be top of mind for all designers and researchers -- what's cool isn't always what's best. You have to start by understanding the underlying user needs -- that's why I firmly believe in continuous user research throughout the design process. (I do think that very successful products can be created through genius ideas outside this formalized process -- iPod anyone??? -- but I'm referring to us normal people who need a little more help along the way to make our products work well...)

Then, on a question on if he agrees with a recent survey in which respondents rated Amazon, eBay and Google as the top 3 international sites in terms of usability, Jesse said the following…

It’s interesting to see Amazon and eBay so high on the list, because I think Amazon was delivering a really terrific experience a few years ago, but have found themselves in a land of diminishing returns in the design choices they are making.

If you compare the sheer number of navigational elements on a present day Amazon page with the way it was just a few years ago, they are just starting to load these pages up with features. I think the reason they are doing that is that they are trying to squeeze every drop of revenue they can out of these pages, but I think the overall usability is starting to suffer. It’s becoming so baroque - all of the different features and components they have loaded onto these pages.

eBay has almost the opposite problem, in that because they have this enormous community of people, the sellers, that depend on eBay for their livelihood, there are a lot of people that have really invested in how the site functions. eBay has been slow to change, because they haven’t been able to make changes that would appease this audience of millions of people that don’t want to see the site change.

My take on it is a little different... I think that if you ask regular Internet users about the usability of a site, they don't think of usability the way we do. They immediately jump to "how useful is it to me." And if a site is useful to them, i.e. it fills that underlying user need we talked about earlier, they will figure out a way to use it and make it work for them. This is not to say that bad usability doesn't matter -- good usability is essential for the sustainability of a site that fulfills user needs effectively. They go hand in hand and can't be separated. The point is that the value propositions of eBay and Amazon are so clear and so significant, and the sites so useful, that if you ask users about usability, they will immediately make the connections to these brands in their minds.