On Definitions
February 27 2008, 3:19pm
The observant of you will have noticed I’ve dropped the “usability consultant” part of my website title. Nothing has changed about the way I work - I’m still just as good at producing intuitive, usable websites as before (IMO, ahem), this is more an issue of focus.
I’ve thought a lot about how to define myself. What do I call the thing I do? I build (that is, design and develop) web applications and social software with a fairly high level of competence across a smorgasbord of buzz-acronyms (AJAX, SEO, MVC, UGC etc), then market them in various ways for example via blog and email marketing, buying and managing ad space and campaigns, partnerships - I even monetise them via affiliate schemes and publishing ads (involving ad sales). Recently, I’ve also been familiarising myself with funnel / goal optimisation and behavioral analytics - or, how to make the most of a site once it has already been built, in order to positively affect a business metric (e.g. revenue or number of new leads). That’s a whole lot of titles, if I wanted it to be. Usually - perhaps for larger projects - there would be a small team of people squirreling away doing all of the above. I tend to battle through it on my own. The closest “name” I can give to all of the above is Web Producer - someone who is has a high level of understanding (and in some areas, a very high technical skillset) in almost all aspects of a website’s design, implementation, deployment, marketing and optimisation.
Brag over. Phew.
That doesn’t explain why I dropped the “usability consultant” part, though.
The answer to that is, as I alluded to already, focus. I find what I do difficult enough to define already without having to stick an “and” in there somewhere. I don’t want to be known as “Yongfook, ______ and ______”, I just want to be known as “Yongfook, ______”. Keep it simple. In the end, I’m defined by my work anyway.
The other reason is something that I’ve been feeling for a long time and that is usability is no longer a trump card. If you aren’t making usable sites, you shouldn’t be making sites in a professional capacity. For the type of clients I work with, a high level of usability in their product is expected, it’s not something you can bill extra for because you are supposedly good at it. There’s a great quote in the recent “2008 Digital Outlook Report” from Avenue A Razorfish, from Joseph Crump, Executive Creative Director,
“Usability - once fetishized - is now merely the price of entry, like seat belts on a car. Desirability is the new Holy Grail of switched-on brands, from airlines to banks to t-shirt makers. The bar is getting raised every day for the way an object or experience looks and feels, its tone of voice, its personality.”
I couldn’t agree more. I also think “Desirability Consultant” would be a fricking cool title, but I don’t think I’m quite there yet ;)
So that’s my little explanation. I think there will always be a place for usability consulting - agencies who can arrange deep user testing and offer high level reporting and optimisation based on analysis, but I’m not going to use usability as a personal title anymore. I create well-designed, usable sites - this much should be apparent from my work - and clients shouldn’t expect anything less from me or need me to spell it out for them.
