Bullshit. Every one seems to have forgotten the basic tenet of usability: “Know the user, and YOU are not the user.”

If a car designer tries to create a similar steering wheel for a production vehicle, I can understand the uproar. But for a customized piece of machinery like a formula 1 car, the discussion is moot.

Most people don’t understand what a motor racing car is. Comparing it with an ordinary road vehicle is idiocy. A casual driver never deals with issues like configuring the fuel mixture, adjusting down-forces and wings. He never drives at speeds of over 300 kmph. He never experiences g-forces of over 4. A Formula 1 car is a complex piece of machinery… Trying to apply ‘iPod style’ usability principles will not work…

The definition of usability is ‘The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.’ And I see no reason why the F10 steering wheel doesn’t adhere to this definition. It is designed for

• a ‘specified users’ – a Formula 1 racing driver
• ‘achieve specified goals’ – win the race
• ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’- the various functions available to the racing driver to win the race
• ‘satisfaction’ – a F1 car is built around a single person, customized to his needs.
• ‘a specified context of use’ – the car and its components are built for one thing only – speed and maneuverability.

As a formula 1 aficionado and a UX practitioner, I belive the F10 steering wheel does what is supposed to do — help the driver race his vehicle.

Absolutely. Without Doubt.

One major interaction that a user has with a system is the documentation accompanying the product, either as printed manuals or their electronic cousins. In fact, any text that a user sees on the screen in the form of labels and copy is a form of technical communication – another source of interaction with the user.

I’ve had many people ask me about transitioning from technical communication to usability/user experience. All I can say to them is that you might already be doing it; only that you aren’t aware of it yet.

Another question I get to field often is how to ‘get into’ it. The answer that I give mostly is Volunteer. Volunteer to check screens/copy text for clarity/disambiguity. Volunteer to check every interaction a user would have with the system. Provide clear and meaningful copy for error messages.

Technical Communicators often forget a very important fact – they are often the first users of a system. Most of the time, they are just concerned about just documenting the system, rather than looking at it from a user perspective. I’ve seen this happen a lot of times and have been guilty of the same on several occasions.

In a blog post at Adaptive Path, Peter Merholz writes, I believe that user experience is not best thought of as an activity or function, but as a mindset. To varying degrees, every customer-facing person in an organization has an impact on, and, thus, responsibility for the user experience.

That’s something everyone aspiring to be a usability practitioner ought to be taking to heart.

Out of the window, via Flickr user: Squirmelia

We deliver all of our documentation as PDFs to our customers (except for that rare marketing collaterals that get printed and distributed). These PDFs are uploaded to a repository and made available to customers (external and internal). Having observed how people use our documentation these past few years, I noticed that only a few people actually ‘glance’ at the Table of Contents. Everyone seems to like the Search button in Acrobat Reader. Just fire a few keywords and Presto!, here are the results.

All that time and effort I spent in developing that ToC and Index was down the proverbial drain as they never saw the user’s eyes. Not that you can blame them for not looking at my lovingly crafted ToC. Information seeking has moved away from getting to know the structure of a guide from the ToC or narrowing down a selective topic from the Index is no longer the right way to do things. It has evolved to the search box. PDFs are great for searching and you can even search multiple PDFs simultaneously.

In a world when documentation was printed and delivered to customers as printed books, the Table of Contents and the Index made sense as you can ‘run’ a search on a printed book. But do they still make sense in an electronic world where documents are created as searchable PDFs?

Is it time to eliminate tables and indices from the documentation deliverables, especially when they are not being printed?

What is usability?

I would define ‘usability’ as ‘the art and science of making things usable’.

Isn’t every product usable?

Yes. Every product is usable. That’s why they are created/manufactured. This holds true for services also.

Then, how does usability come into the picture?

Products are designed to satisfy a need or a want. A mobile phone allows you to be ‘contactable’. A music system allows you to listen to music; a television to watch live sports. These are the basic needs that a product ‘must’ satisfy. That’s why you buy a product. Usability, as I mentioned, makes these things usable, like say, a well-designed remote for your television/music system usually by enhancing your interactions with a product.

Let me put it in another way: Life is full of interactions. You interact with various people and products daily. To make a call on your phone, you interact with your phone by pressing a few keys to call someone or a single key to receive a call. Usability is making these interactions subtle or unnoticable. Do you know how many keys you press to make a call? You never realise it. Every product has these interactions. Some interactions make you cringe like ‘being put on hold while trying to call customer care’. Some are completely unnoticable like calling someone on your mobile.

How is it both an art and a science?

It is a science as the process of making things usable is a scientific and measurable process. It is an art because a good usable product brings a bit of emotion in your interactions with it.

I will be updating this post frequently.

Having completed a Master’s in Entrepreneurship Studies, I wasn’t really ready for that jump into entrepreneurship. I need time – time to discover my boundaries; time to discover and rediscover what I wanted to do; time to understand what I was really good at and if I was really good at it.

When I finished college, the objective section of my resume had this single line: To become an intrapreneur in the organisation I work in. Intrapreneurship – a nice fancy word I chose for myself – a word that meant the practice of entrepreneurial skills and approaches by or within a company. I now realize that I’ve been working as an intrepreneur or a quasi-entrepreneur in whatever I did at my career down the years.

I took a decision to take an offbeat track even before my career took off. I was off to write stuff when my fellow students were looking at the lure of a good sales job or a career writing code. I was proud of what I did then as I am right now heading into a new direction.

I guess it is the time to really challenge myself to make that dream come alive. It is time I moved from being an intrapreneur to an entrepreneur.