About 10 years ago I would have told any new usability specialist to spend time learning about the Internet. I might have even encouraged that person to learn about web site hosting, HTML, and JavaScript. I would have made these recommendations because the web ushered in such a profound change.
These days, I would not talk about the web that much. Yes, it still offers a million opportunities to usability specialists, much like desktop software still offers opportunities, but it isn’t as cutting edge or as interesting. I would point a new usability specialist to mobile phones. More precisely, I would encourage folks to specialize on the iPhone. I know that this is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket, but the basket is huge and growing. More importantly, the challenges are intense from a user experience perspective.
A mobile phone is a complex mix of hardware and software. Mobile phones are finally coming out of the primordial soup. Small, light, powerful tools usually beat big, heavy, slow tools. To put it another way, your mobile phone is getting to be as powerful as, if not more important than your desktop or laptop computer. That means more people having more problems for more reasons. The future of usability is mobile.
Technology is extremely mobile but information is now more mobile too. The future of usability isn’t just mobile technology but the increased mobility of information. In years past, information moved more slowly than it does now. It was also narrower, more refined, and more controlled. Simply compare the distribution of news 20 years ago via TV, radio and newspapers compared with the internet, satellite radio, and email. The difference in information mobility is over the top.
I believe that instead of doing research with people interacting with user interfaces and technologies, we need to start doing much more research tied specifically to contexts, situations, human networking, information sharing, awareness and the like.
In effect, this amounts to doing testing on the information itself versus people. The focus of this testing would be on how information changes, moves and adapts to situations. In this paradigm I’m suggesting, people are not any given special status but they are instead part of a larger system, where information itself takes a more prominent, equal role.
In the usability world now, the emphasis is almost always on the user first and the interface second. The information passed between the human and the interface is hardly discussed and rarely tested. My point is that the smartest usability specialists will spend time working directly with the information itself, acknowledging that information is extremely mobile and flexible.
People are very accustomed to getting the same information in multiple formats and devices: email, web, print, PDF, mobile phone, TV, radio. Yet this information is not the same in each of these contexts. You can’t click on a link in a radio advertisement. You can’t print out a TV commercial. The exact same information changes due to the context and technology.
This offers up an incredible number of challenges for usability specialists, which of course needs to be seen as a genuine business opportunity.