User Experience Process

When should usability and user experience be designed into a product?

Day 1. You can't "add usability" to a product. You have to design it in from the beginning.

Okay, if you are building a platform you can do a bit of proof of concept work before you start working on usability, but you need to start architecting the user experience even before you have any products.

Imagine if SMS was designed without considering (appropriate) use cases. Or imagine if they missed the fact that typing is difficult on a phone. The architects may have decided that each message needed a subject, or that each message could have a maximum 2000 characters. Either of these would have bloated the system to the point of unusability.

We have current evidence of the problem: MMS has a very lose standard, with lots of capabilities. It is very powerful - but building a collage of images and sounds on the phone is going to be very hard. It will even be very hard on a computer. Despite the ridiculousness of the standard, manufacturers and carriers valiently try to meet it.

Another example: XHTML was not architected to be usable on the phone. This is unsurprising, but it is hurting us now. HDML (Openwave's predecessor to WML which strongly influenced WML 1.1) was designed to be optimized for phones. It looks antiquated to us today, largely due the the lack of any sort of fonts, font sizes, colors, or graphics. That doesn't mean we couldn't learn from it: I can more readily add graphics to HDML than I can add cache control, navigation control such as subroutines, and multiple commands to XHTML. In fact, if I want to replicate the user experience from HDML, I would have to abandon XHTML browsers all together, and build my own system - both language and browser.

I have more than once been brought into a project partway through, been asked to design "the user interface", and been told repeatedly "we can't do that". Such projects turn into a long series of compromises between what should have been and what had to be, just because I was not brought in at the beginning.

So when I hear, we want to "address the usability once when the major features are ready", I cringe.