usability challenges of web 2.0 applications

In this month’s Interactions feature article Is Usability Obsolete?, Katie Minardo Scott raises a number of interesting issues about usability in a Web 2.0 world:

Usability can no longer keep up with computing: The products are too complex, too pervasive, and too easy to build. And in our absence, users and engineers are beginning to take over the design process. Five trends demonstrate the growing gap between usability theory and commercial practice – the “new realities” of computing haven’t been truly embraced by the usability community. The trends are, at a minimum, making traditional usability more difficult, if not irrelevant in the new paradigm.

I am certainly no usability expert, rather just curiously interested in the field.

Modern software, particularly social web and/or mobile applications definitely appear to pose new and different challenges – in many respects. The example of a location-dependent web service that incorporates user-contributed data seems particularly well chosen. It involves many different aspects, each of which could make or break the user experience.

As these new classes of applications are developed, researched and understood better, software development approaches also change, incl. introduction of new tools, algorithms and practices.

I don’t see, why the same couldn’t also happen for usability work. A lot of basic usability information has become near-common knowledge. According to the author:

[...] with the growth of the Web and usability, clients are likely to know the underlying usability principles, be familiar with the core heuristics, and have already solved the obvious “gotchas” in their products. They may even have in-house usability departments, labs, and protocols. Fewer and fewer clients need to be reminded of the basics. The heuristics we test for and baseline against are pervasive; at some level, we’ve put ourselves out of business.

On some level, I am inclined to take the above quote from the article as an encouraging sign of a maturing field. System administrators often strive to automate as many of their tasks as possible. Similarly, developers come up with automation tools and essentially means to achieve more in less time. Examples from other fields could easily be provided.

This can often result in people being able to start focusing on more advanced problems, which may not have been practical or feasible before. I bet a lot of people find it refreshing to focus less on educating their clients about the needs for basic work and rather focus on addressing harder problems.