I know--most of you are scratching your heads. I would be, too, if I weren't already bald and concerned with eliminating the last of my locks. Soulja Boy is one of the currently-hot rappers/dancers in the world of. . .well, rapping and dancing. His latest hot video, "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" features the Soulja Boy dance. So now you're caught up on your pop culture.
I know you people remember the Twist and the Mashed Potato (and I'm pretty sure Fred remembers the Lindy Hop). The Soulja Boy isn't much different. Watch this video, or at least some of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLGLum5SyKQ
A dance is something which can be taught quite well using Web 2.0 methods, don't you think?
It seems to me that the discussion of online usability testing, and usability instruction online, should begin with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 might be loosely defined as the media-rich, user-friendly environment in which distributed power relationships lead to frequent, and often very effective, feedback from a variety of users in a short amount of time. YouTube is an example of Web 2.0, as are blogs and wikis. I've included "media-rich," though clearly wikis and blogs can be entirely text-based; however, it's important to note that wikis and blogs are becoming increasingly multi-media venues (hence the term "vlog" to denote a "video blog").
The Web 2.0 environment might even be described as the ultimate in usability testing. You're publishing to an audience who, increasingly, cannot be defined other than to be called "users." I've seen YouTube versions of the Soulja Boy dance done by Arabs, Americans of all ages and shapes, and people from (quite literally) all over the planet. These folks see the original post, to the extent that we have "original posts" anymore, and then rather than commenting or critiquing as they would in a focus group (Usability 1.0) they make their own version (Usability 2.0). The user feedback is thus more complete in that the user generates a personal version of what should have been.
So that's my take on World Usability Day, making usability work online. We don't have to anymore. The users have become the designers, the testers, and the center. Just like in Robert Johnson's User-Centered Design, the users have taken over.
I don't know what anyone else is thinking, but that's what I've been thinking about. The transformative nature (to use Fred's and Rich's language) of these technologies have not merely transformed how we access texts: they've transformed WHO is creating the text.
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I think Pete offers us a good, controversial starting point for discussion. Here’s part of his good post to the blog:
“So that's my take on World Usability Day, making usability work online. We don't have to anymore. The users have become the designers, the testers, and the center. Just like in Robert Johnson's User-Centered Design, the users have taken over.”
My reaction, as a web developer and a usability engineer, is this is really romanticizing Web 2.0. To continue with the soulja motif, let me say, “it ain’t all that and a bag o’ chips.” It just isn’t that completely organic that users have absolute control of the environment. There are elements that have been contrived, in structure, in layout, in the system itself, that are beyond their control and that do impact their use of the said system.
Users do with web 2.0 have increased control, can contribute content, even manipulate to a certain degree the look and feel of their system interface, but not to such a degree that the system becomes organically an extension of their own body system.
The fact is that as long as a system, a software, or a product is built by others for the use of others, usability must be assessed, must be made part of the iterative process of modifying the system, software, or product.
Now does Web 2.0 enable the user to have more of a say in usability? In theory perhaps it does. But in theory is the need for usability assessment done away with because the system in use has been designed by users for users? I really think the answer is no. Now this may mean that external usability assessment, more heuristic in nature, is less necessary or useful, but I've always questioned its inherent value anyway. But it does not mean that usability assessment of some kind should not occur.
If the argument is that this will naturally happen in an evolutionary, adaptive way because people are designers and users of the same thing, that, therefore, usability and development are naturally tied up together and so do not require any formal methods of assessment, then I guess that’s a strain of discussion to explore. But predicating this possibility, among other things, is that Web 2.0 is an organic system, product of and producer for the individual user. Again, that just isn’t the case.
So for me a more interesting theoretical as well as practical discussion (and that’s what we do—theory and praxis) is one in which we discuss the modifications, new methodological approaches necessary to make usability assessment useful in the Web 2.0 environment. We don’t want to do away with a means of assessment that right now is generally underused if not misused. How do we establish qualitative rigor when assessing the usability of Web 2.0? Perhaps this can trickle off into a theoretical sidebar on “just how organic does a contrived system have to be not require usability assessment?”
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