A mandatory visit from the Feng Shui master to ensure that any changes to the site maintains or enhances the geomantic relationship with the land and the people using it. In other words, we call in a mystic to do a spiritual site audit prior to disrupting the balance of things. For projects of any scale, calling in a Feng Shui master early can save costs in having to rearrange things at a later date.
The origins of Feng Shui can be attributed to the climactic characteristics of Ancient China. In a way, much of the positioning of structures in a land filled with typhoons, floods, and earthquakes was based on common sense. A lot of Feng Shui derives from an early heuristic of practical living, which over the centuries has been codified into a semi-mystical veneer of positioning. Even from an aesthetic perspective, the practice provides a visual balance for arranging everything from furniture to organizations. The development of Fung Shui and Usability are based upon the same vision of practicality.
Usability can trace much of its origins from the early constraints and characteristics of the World Wide Web - particularly lack of bandwidth and limited screen size. Users finding frustration at slow or confusing sites on the Net have thrown up their hands in despair and moved on to better alternatives. Usability experts have developed guidelines, some extreme, for ensuring that the user experience develops positively and that sites will attract new and returning users. Logical navigation, clear directions, limiting bandwidth-hogging graphics and an adherence to testing and more testing with real users remain the pillars of the usability mantra. Much of it is reinstalling basic common sense that may have been lost by over-enthusiastic designers and out of touch digerati developers. Like modern Feng Shui, no website should go live without first consulting a usability expert and having it tested.
The rationale for running usability testing prior to launch shares much of the same attributes as that of Feng Shui. Run the test early to catch errors and tweak the site so that late development changes will not require a major overhaul. The cost of re-launching a site can be more expensive in terms of time, money and brand than just running a test before the launch even if it causes additional expenses and time delays.
Some good examples of bad launches were the Salon site makeover, the introduction of New Coke, WAP and Network Of the World (NOW). All were really not bad products but the context of how they were launched and hyped to how incongruent they were with actual customer expectations and experience led to the negative responses from their users.Would more usability testing have caught the flaws? Maybe, but based on the circumstances, the problems were perhaps larger than the products or sites themselves. Usability testing would have caught more of the problems earlier so that a change in plans and execution could have reduced the problems that eventually occurred.
Going forward, the usability practice in Asia may face some changes. Like Buddhism, automobiles, and electronic manufacturing, things have a tendency to change when they arrive in China and Japan. Cultural influences, coupled with pragmatic constraints, will produce a mutated product different than the one that arrived. With usability, regional aesthetics will change the face of what current experts consider a usable, front-end website. The Danish heritage of Jakob Nielsen has probably played a role in his advocacy of Scandinavianlike minimalism on website design as well as the precepts of the Bauhaus school in elevating form with functionality.
The weakness of usability stems from its greatest asset - the experience base of the user. Since usability is a backward-looking methodology dependent on the cognitive background of the test subject, the designs and the processes of the "new and better" may fall victim to user unfamiliarity and initial learning needs. If one were to deconstruct usability, one would find that the concepts being touted are really snapshots of European aesthetics and of late 1990's US website technology. This is not to imply that usability has no merit for Asia, but that it requires some customization for local application and the changes in technology. Simply transplanting usability methodology from the west for sites aimed at Asian audiences seems to invite the potential for invalid results. Likewise, developing sites from Asia for western users using only Asian as usability subje cts may also yie ld confusing results.
Like Feng Shui, usability in Asia will splinter into factions with some common principles but numerous methodologies. Regardless of the dogma emanating from the US on usability, each case still needs to be examined individually.
In Asia, the selection of the test subjects will play a more crucial role since the divergence in cultures, language, and background appears far more complex. As in any clinical behavioral test, the language of the questions, the attitude of the tester, and the background of the subjects invariably play a significant role in the results. This being the case, there needs to be more attention paid to understanding the behavioral characteristics and sensitivities of Asian users beyond just counting where they go and for how long. One needs to take the next step and ask why and how far the findings can be generalized. Unlike Feng Shui, usability needs to move beyond the mystical if it hopes to ever move beyond web development and into general process thinking. If they do not, then usability is dead. // Frank Yu, Ion Global Research