An Interview with David Travis (Userfocus)
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 by Deirdre DeversNot content to offer their skills to blue chip clients such as Barclays and eBay, Userfocus also provides training courses in areas including user experience design, intranet usability and usability testing. The person behind Userfocus is psychologist David Travis who shares his thoughts in this month’s interview.
How did you get into this field and what sorts of things had you done previously?
Between 1979 and 1986, I earned a degree and a Ph.D in psychology (from the universities of London and Cambridge) and then embarked on an academic career of post-doc research. My interest was in human colour vision and Andrew Monk at the University of York encouraged me to write a cross-over book to help HCI people use colour effectively on displays (called, predictably, “Effective Color Displays”). At the time, designing for colour displays was like designing for Web 2.0: it was seen as a real paradigm shift from the previous technology (even though, in reality, all the old rules still apply). The book got me on the agenda of some people at BT’s research labs in Ipswich who headhunted me for a job in their graphical user interfaces team in 1989 (sadly, it’s the only time I’ve ever been headhunted). I quickly realised that colour was just one element of interface design and BT gave me the opportunity to design usability labs and mock-up future HCI concepts, like telepresence. This gave me the urge to do more applied work, so in 1995 I moved to System Concepts and built up their practice in usability consultancy. I founded Userfocus in 2002.
What are some things (or people) that inspire how you think about and then develop digital experiences for users?
At the University of York in 1986 Andrew Monk introduced me to the Mac. Before that I’d been programming PDP-11s to support my research activities and this was the first graphical user interface I’d ever seen. It was an epiphany. Andrew had a post-doc working with him at the time who insisted on giving me a tutorial on how to use a Mac, as if this was some untamed beast I was about to be let loose on, but I was dying just to play with it. So I’d get into work at 8am before anyone else (this doesn’t seem early to me now but this was at a University) to spend time playing around with MacDraw and Cricket Graph, two wonderful Mac applications. I was blown away by the possibilities. It was like Adam’s first words to Eve: “Stand back, I don’t know how big this thing is going to get.”
From a practitioner’s perspective, the two biggest influences on me have been Bill Buxton and Tom Stewart. I’ve worked with both of them and learnt the importance of a pragmatic approach to design problems and to avoid “analysis paralysis”.
There are various definitions of UX out there depending on who you talk to… What does UX mean to you?
I like the quote from Whitney Quesenbery: “User Experience v. User Interaction v. User Interface v. Information Architecture v. Information Design v. Human Factors v. User-Centered Design v. Performance Centered Design v. … As far as I can tell, a choice of title says more about “where you got on the bus” than any real distinction of goals.”
To me, user centred design means three things: 1. Early and continual focus on users and their tasks. 2. Empirical measurement of user behaviour. 3. Iterative design. You may be doing design, but if you’re not doing all of these things then you’re not user centred.
How does London influence you when it comes to creating and refining interactive experiences?
I’m a Londoner by birth, so I’m not sure how to distinguish the way it influences my work from the influence of just being born here. For example, I’ve borrowed Transport for London’s “red routes” as a metaphor for critical tasks with a product (http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/redroutes.html). I’d also point to the sheer number of people in London as an influence. The number of different people that you see every day makes you realise that you can’t do design without some kind of audience research.
Thinking about past or current projects, in what ways, if any, have the expectations changed in terms of the type of UX that is sought (or expected) by users?
In my experience of running hundreds of usability sessions, users tend to have fairly low expectations and are delighted to discover that someone values their opinion. Intranets in particular show woeful levels of usability even though Intranet users are exposed to good web sites every day. So I’m not sure that user expectations have altered much. Clients, on the other hand, are now much more clued up about usability and will approach us with a specific plan of action that they want us to implement. Sometimes this is well thought out, and sometimes it’s poorly thought out, but it shows clearly that the notion of usability is now high on the agenda.
If you were asked to share a book, either fiction or non-fiction, with a colleague in your field, what would it be and why?
Am I allowed to recommend my own book, “E-Commerce Usability”? If not, I’d choose “Strangers to Ourselves” by Timothy D. Wilson. Wilson’s book describes study after study proving that we have very little insight into the motivations behind our behaviour. When designing new products, this means you can’t just ask people what they like or don’t like. You must focus on observable behaviour using techniques like contextual inquiry and “proper” usability testing (i.e. not the kind of usability tests that are run like a 1-1 focus group that spotlight user opinions).
What advice would you give to students interested in this profession?
Having the right technical skills and the right experience will get you only so far. We interview many new graduates and a common problem with many of them is a lack of passion. If you look at some of the best, most inspirational practitioners in our field you’ll see that they think of their work, not as a job, but as a calling. They see the impact of technology on people’s lives as important. They feel that good design makes the world a better place — and that bad design can make life miserable (as anyone who’s worked in a badly designed work environment, like a call centre, would agree). So my advice is: find your passion, pursue it and your career will take care of itself.
What trend(s) do you see advancing that will influence the UX of interactive systems?
I think a key trend is towards really measuring usability, not just testing a product to find usability problems. This means assigning a number to say how usable a product or web site actually is. Unfortunately, many people seem to think that usability measurement means stuff like eye tracking, simply because eye tracking generates lots of numbers and plots pretty graphs. A better example is the usability standard, ISO 20282 (“Ease of operation of everyday products”) which I think will prove to have a huge influence on our field. ISO 20282 includes test methods for quantifying the usability of consumer products to ensure they meet a pre-defined quality level. This development is exciting because it reflects a sea change in the evolving practice of usability. In the old world, usability specialists just found usability problems with a design. In the new world, usability specialists will also answer the question: “How usable is this design?”
