Guerrilla thinking

If your work requires a minimum web oriented thought, you certainly happened to hear or read the word “usability”. 
Whenever it is time to create a new website, intranet or web app, someone from your own company or from another agency will pop up and say the magic word “usability”. 

A little of them seriously know what they’re talking about though.
Many so called usability experts spend their entire existence trying to convince clients and co-workers that spending ages thinking about where to place a SUBMIT button is worth money.

Truth is that it is not.
Usability made perfect sense in times when people were not accustomed to digital interaction. Making things simple by defining a standard was certainly necessary.
Any website started placing corporate logo on top left corner and create content that could be easily read from left to right.
Defining a standard surely helped to convey a common and shared set of knowledge.

But as it usually happens, with the growing awareness and penetration of the web, people started to get used to digital interfaces and this basic set of knowledge evolved and became a common heritage among people using interfaces.

A deeply understanding of usability is so widespread that the most successful pieces of software are made by people complete unaware of any scholarly criteria of usability.Take the appstore most successful apps. Do you think any of them were made by asking a usability expert how to create their interfaces?

We are not obviously saying that studying HCI (Human and Computer Interaction) makes no sense at all anymore.
But with the advent of touch devices this common heritage of knowledge is becoming so much shared among users that this whole branch of study should, we think, start from scratch.

That’s why our guerrilla thought for today is that keeping the old “usability” approach in such an evolving and people-owned scenario makes little sense these days.

If a million people buy an app coded by a 19 years old guy from Iowa and find it perfectly usable, maybe our usability gurus should start to think how to evolve their knowledge and adapt it to the evolution of the market or, maybe better, considering other options for their careers.