Usability as a Path to Failure? Surely Not.

Todd Wilkins at Adaptive Path has thrown down a gauntlet to usability professionals, claiming that usability is not only overrated, but even injurious and a path to failure. He cites successful artists who didn't worry about "usability" either. He says:

So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a *different* place in my pants to put them on. (Admittedly, I *do* give my 2 year old daughter a gold star for this but then she’s 2.) Usability is not a strategy for design success. The efficiency you create in your interface will be copied almost instantaneously by your competitors. Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure. Usability is too low level, too focused on minutia. It can’t compel people to be interested in interacting with your product or service. It can’t make you compelling or really differentiate you from other organizations. Or put another way, there’s only so far you can get by streamlining the shopping cart on your website.

Ahem.

Rarely do I see a designer get this blatant. They may think this drivel, but they don't usually voice it before a plunge into happy hour. First, usability here might seem synonymous with "make stuff easy to see". We professionals know this is not anywhere close to being true. Second, it entirely overlooks that websites aren't works of art, unless they're private, non-commercial ones. Commercial (e-commerce) sites are for making money, and every visitor who snorts in frustration and leaves is a financial failure, not a failure to make a friend. Visitors don't need to be engaged, or have fun in most cases. They need to transact. They need to do the tasks they arrived to do. Much "design" merely gets in the way of that simple goal, and ought to be cut out like a splinter under the fingernail, because it provides about as much value. A big-time website isn't an opportunity to dance the visitor about. It's to enable him to act.

Of course any successful design will be copied. But then, there are only a few designs in human experience, and they're all copied every day. Graphic designers tend to think that their designs are unique and powerful. Most often the ones that are sold this way are actually glitz with no go, at their core simply reproductions of past designs with a few cosmetic changes. There are only so many ways to arrange elements on a surface.

In my view, websites are not akin to artworks, but more like cars. First you make sure the damned thing drives properly, and then you dress it up. Not the other way around. We tolerate few physical objects in our lives that are as poorly designed as "cool" or "artistic" websites, yet we complain about the physical and work our way around the virtual. This seems asinine to me.