In: utility, desirability. On the way out: usability

I’ve been catching up on the history of the web, interaction design and customer experience lately, so there’s a lot of related books lying about the house: Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, Accidental Empires by R. Cringely, Don Norman’s Emotional Design, Where Wizards Stay up Late, Weaving the Web by Sir Tim himself, etc. etc. (I like switching books like others flick between channels, authors don’t get interrupted often enough, and sometimes there’s a strobing effect that produces ideas…).

But then Owen and ER came to visit and Owen said I should watch what I’m reading or I might turn into a usability expert. Which would be a terrible fate.

Because, in the grim world of usability, it’s all about tasks that you have to perform, as efficiently as possible. In usability, people never just show up, play around, wander about or say, “So. Tell me.” They’ve always got tasks to perform, the poor things. Jakob don’t play.

The good news is that usability is going out of style. While utility and desirability are in. It’s taken long enough but apparently everyone now agrees that, in products and services, even on the web, useful is actually more important than usable. Then there’s the revelation, in a recent Forrester report, that boring is bad. And finally there are Jesse James Garrett’s comments in last week’s interview with e-consultancy’s Richard Maven:

People want products that have a personality and to have a sense of who the product is. Traditional usability is not designed to address that, so we have found ourselves looking more to traditional techniques from marketing and branding…

It adds up. Does anyone else get the feeling that usability (how) is getting squeezed out between usefulness (why) and branding (who)?