Usability – designing for people

At last, the 16:9 aspect ratio for TV sets is a well established standard in the UK. It is a much more pleasing format, aesthetically better and closer to the wide field of vision which humans actually see the world in. It’s all good…

Unfortunately, there is still a down side to widescreen caused by a sorry lack of technical standards, perpetuated by that shoddy video device connector, SCART.

So what is the problem? Picture distortion. It really irks me to see a 4:3 aspect ratio picture stretched to fit a 16:9 widescreen TV set. In most cases this is down to bad setup. Most people don’t know about aspect ratios or obscure equipment settings, nor should they need to.

Why does this happen? Video sources, like Freeview boxes, satellite receivers, DVD players, etc. often default to 4:3 ’squarevision’, even though most TV sets they are likely to be plugged in to are widescreen. Of course this equipment shouldn’t just default to something, it should know automatically how to deal with what it is plugged into, as should the TV set.

Even worse, the video source sometimes outputs 16:9 while the TV set thinks its got 4:3, then you get 16:9 compressed and displayed at 4:3.

We put men on the moon in the 1960’s, yet in the 21st century TV sets and video sources cannot figure out something basic like aspect ratio. We could blame SCART again, but that’s a poor excuse. Roll on HDMI.

One final oddity while I’m on this subject – why do people deliberately stretch a 4:3 picture to fit a widescreen TV set? It looks awful. It’s like they’ve paid for that extra screen space and they’re going to damn well use it.

Whatever you want to call it, there is a step-change taking place and Web 1.0 is making way for a new generation of better more useful sites. But what characterises all these great new web sites?

Here’s my take on what makes a web site ‘2.0′:

1. Ground-breaking utility
2. Great usability
3. Clean functional design
4. Lots of user generated content
5. Personalisation
6. APIs to allow other sites to hook into content and functionality
7. Content aggregation / mashups
8. A bit of luck

If the term paradigm shift hadn’t fallen so far out of favour, I would have used that too! Based on these characteristics, you could say that Web 2.0 is just 1.0 done properly. A gross oversimplification I admit.

One key element of a great W2 site (we need a more suitable moniker for this) is rapid growth and large numbers of users. This would not happen without exceptional usability.

I guess what I am getting around to saying is that usability is a key driver for any successful web site. The W2 phenomenon proves this.