Fashion: A Useful Usability Placebo by Andrew Swartz, Managing Consultant - Serco Usability Services (UK)

Let’s swallow hard and say something difficult but true. It may feel like a dietician being forced to discuss the merits of chocolate cake, but still it has to be said. So here it is, straight and clear, right at the beginning: sometimes fashion is more important than usability.

Why is that so difficult to say? Maybe it’s because we’ve spent decades trying to get developers and designers to pay any attention to the user’s needs whatsoever. Not just that, but also we’ve been building a profession from scratch, cost justifying our very existence, and fighting boneheaded ideas, such as all you need to do to fix a bad interface is to make one horrible screen slide elegantly into the next. So it is difficult to admit that simple usability is only one component of the users’ entire experience—an important component of course, but still just one of many.

Here’s a story I’ve told before. A while back, we studied two versions of a mobile phone Menu screen. The first showed 12 icons, each with a name underneath it. The second showed the same 12 icons but without names. All the people who tried the two versions were much more successful using the version with the names. But they greatly and unanimously preferred the version without the names. They weren’t fooling themselves either. They knew they were more successful with one version but preferred the other. Why? The version without the names was more fashionable‐looking at the time than the version with names. And because the version without the names wasn’t too difficult to use, fashion trumped usability.

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