justaddwater.dk

It was Tuesday – The second and final day of the Danish usability conference “Usability Dagene 2005” (Usability Days 2005). Today’s keynotes was delivered first by Eric Reiss and then from Rolf Molich from DialogDesign in the afternoon.

Jesper and I will try to publish the notes we took during the conference in a later post when we have time to compare them. Here I will just try to cover the highlights of Eric Reiss’ presentation.

It was really interesting to hear (and experience) Eric Reiss for about an hour delivering his very different speech. He started out by telling us that a given development tool or CMS not necessarily provide us with great usability. He did that by accidentally cutting him self with a kitchen knife while showing us how to slice mushrooms on a Steinway piano.

Among interesting subjects can be mentioned how we as usability front-fighters convert the non-believers in management that usability really is the place to put the money. He also showed us what would happen when we succeeded. I was lucky enough to get to chat with him after the conference and he gave me this very neat roadmap that illustrates it very well. Now I just really hope that it was OK for me to publish it:

According to Eric Reiss this beer mat roadmap is the work of Bogo Vatovec.

Nice way to illustrate how our finest job is to make our self’s redundant as usability experts. So that if we do our work properly, then good usability should be so ordinary that we don’t have to remind people to implement it. Personally I could also interpret it as what happens when I talk to a site owner about usability: When I’m gone he has forgot all about it ;)

This lead directly to the other major subject of his speech: ROI, and if this really is our best argument. OK, admitted we don’t waste time using this argument – Try to search Google for “Return on Investment” and look at the first three hits. Yes, two of them are by Jakob Nielsen ;)

And then the punch line: “Please drop the voodoo economics”! We hear (or say) it all the time, like for example “You get 20% more paying visitors on your site if you follow my advice”. I know Eric said that we should find our own “cup holder” (our selling argument, for those of you who was not attending the conference) – and that is of cause correct, but I would argue that since nobody can find out what that “cup holder” should be and since usability is and always will be based on human opinions we ought to stick to the only two things we have known to work so far: Looking at existing before-and-after statistics of other sites and using usability testing to create the most accurate guess we can.

That said I just have to once again thank you Eric for a great and very inspiring presentation. It was my first chance to hear him talk and I hope his finger is OK.

Technorati tags: usability conference event ericreiss jakobnielsen usabilitydagene

This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 23:50 (GMT-1) and is filed under justaddwater.dk, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.