UsabilityNews: Seeing design in context

Paul Curzon of the Interaction Design Centre at Middlesex University highlights the role of context in usability in his thoughtful article When Smart Thinking is not Enough.

Curzon discusses how context, not just smart thinking is important in design, to highlight his point he cites J-D Bauby, an author who suffers from locked in syndrome. In order to write his book Bauby devised a system where he would blink when his assistant said the letter he wanted to use. They refined this slightly so that instead of using alphabetical order (a,b,c,d) they would use letter frequency order (e,s,a,r).

Looking at optimising this system by reducing the number of question the assistant asks Curzon suggests several ways a computer scientist might "enrich" Bauby's life, all very straight forward. But then looking at the problem again from Bauby's point of view, Curzon shows that what sounds like a reasonable solution out of context, might not enrich Bauby's life at all. In fact it might have the opposite effect!

What Curzon is demonstrating is that designing a solution to a problem is all well and good but that solution must enrich the life of end user. The only way this can be achieved is by completely understanding the user; this means seeing the bigger picture, understanding the environmental factors, the context and not doing anything to compromise that.