Non-Linear Usability: A Shift in Our Orientation from Task Driven to Experience Driven Applications
Brian Stone and Daniel Alenquer · DS 46: Proceedings of E&PDE 2008, the 10th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, Barcelona, Spain, 04.-05.09.2008 · 2008
Over the last decade, the concept of usability has gained traction in the domain of design education. Usability is based on delivering applications that support the completion of tasks. Whether it is a physical product, a space, or an on-screen application such as a web site, the artifact should be easy to use, easily learned, have good affordances, and offer the end user accelerators and the ability to quickly recover from error. Usability concepts are of increasingly more important concern to design and engineering practitioners and educators. Products and artifacts that deliver strong usability characteristics have become competitive differentiators in a market filled with product options. Furthermore, due to the changing expectations and orientation of users, products that exhibit poor usability characteristics not only subvert the efforts of designers and engineers, but also create negative perceptions about a company or organization. Thus far, usability’s orientation has been linear. It is focused on the completion of task, i.e., going from point A to point B. However, when dealing with more experiential applications, ones that are not task driven and non-linear in nature, a new set of issues emerges. In the context of experiential usability, we can not predict when, where, what and how long a user may be engaged in an application, however the end goal still remains to make the interaction easy. Considering these issues, it has become important that design education in collaboration with engineering take a leadership position in defining the heuristics and characteristics of strong experiential usability. These ideas have been incorporated in our teaching with measurable success, and the realization of a repository of principles and patterns is now required.