How We Work : Blog

"I really like the process of peeing. It aids in purging the unnecessary and bad stuff from the system. When done in a precise and on the mark fashion, will surely leave anyone with a sense of relief and good feelings of having just been through a great experience.”

In line with World Usability Day which falls today, the 14^th of November 2006, I have decided to commemorate this meaningful day with a piece on, what else, Usability.
Right, let’s get on with the show.

Let me get one thing straight first. I have a major gripe when it comes to this topic ‘Usability’. I really hate this term. It explicitly implies a 'user'. The more we use the word ‘usability’, logically our mind starts to encase around the concept that the target audience of whatever we develop are good ‘ole ‘users’. Is it just me or does anyone else find it insanely odd how the industry labels your target audience and clientele the same way society labels a bunch of crack addicts? Users, Schmu-users, I say.

Besides, there’s that other issue with the term ‘user’. The term ‘user’ is so stripped of emotions and thoughts. The word ‘user’ is so void of past experience, curiosity, logical thinking and analysis. And the more we use the term ‘users’ and ‘usability’, the more we believe the ‘user’ (you made me use the 4-letter bad word again!) is indeed so. Just some faceless entity somewhere out there.

But people (well, most that I have encountered thus far at least...) are not zilch in those departments. And as technology proponents, we really need to acknowledge this. We need to understand and realize that behind all the fast-paced advancements in the field of Internet technologies, behind all the bells and whistles that Flash animation and video streaming bring, all those fancy widgets and applets, all those funky graphics and feature-bursting web applications, that at the very end of the day, people, yes people, are the ones who are going to interact with your systems.

Hence rather than naming this field ‘Usability’, ‘User Interface Design’, ‘User Experience Design’ or what not, I instead propose that the powers that be join me in propagating this new acronym I have coined for this respectable and highly important field of Internet development. I have sat down and thought long and hard to derive this acronym and without further ado, I give you PEE. It stands for People Experience Engineering of course, what else could it be.

Whatever we develop, we develop with people in mind. We need to engineer a powerful, emotional experience which people can relate to and respond accordingly in order to be effective and meet the business goals of our clients. We need to engineer the experience such that peoples’ needs too are fulfilled, be it using imagery, interactivity, content and/or whatever technologies currently at our disposal. We need to always engineer the perfect experience for PEOPLE. We need to PEE.

In the early ‘90s till recent years, projecting your business onto the Internet has always been a ‘first-place’ rush basis. So many businesses flocked to jump onto the Internet bandwagon, in order not to get left behind. That was back in the hay day. As time went by, many businesses found themselves floundering in their online forays. They wondered what went wrong, why didn’t the market respond to what they had presented to the Internet community? Many simply faded away, with the deluded belief that the medium was just too new and their target audience was simply not ready for this brave new front.

Sadly, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. If they had only put more thought into PEE-ing, their online presence might still be around today. Whilst the in-thing back then was “Let’s get it up NOW”, businesses today seriously need to rethink their online strategy. They need to formulate their plans with this new mantra: “Let’s now make it WORK.”

So this is going to be the premise of what I will be talking about in the coming weeks. I hope to be able to share some of the PEE-ing concepts I have come across both on projects I have worked on as well as from general reading from books, websites dedicated to this field as well as other resources. It is my hope that everyone should learn to PEE. It’s really not as difficult as it sounds; all it takes is a little conscious effort.

So remember to PEE regularly, for the consequences of not doing so can be potentially damaging. Kidney and bladder infections have been known to result, though still significantly not as damaging as a bad web experience.

Arthur