UsableMarkets

James Surowieki has a nice piece in The New Yorker this week about the tension between the desire to have as many features as possible in a product (or website, for that matter), and the counter-desire for usability, which emphasizes less features and more ease-of-use.

Specifically it highlights the problem of listening too closely to what your customers want – which often enough is as much as they can get.

Anyone in the usability profession understands this problem. To combat this, the tools that usability experts use are designed not to listen to what people want, but to understand what they need.

This is a crucial difference, and one that is often hard for people to understand.

“We’ll just ask users what they think,” is a common refrain I hear when talking with people about how to make their applications more usable. Well, it’s not just about “asking users,” it’s about observing them. It’s about understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. It’s about observing things in people they don’t observe in themselves, or think is “not important enough to mention.”

The irony is that making something usable is often enough not listening to your users. But it’s always about understanding them.

As always, thanks for listening.

~alex