Even a restaurant can incorporate poka-yoke devices.

Yesterday, I visited a great little casual dining place called Switch (which apparently has no website) for the first time. When I walked in, I was told that I could grab any table that had a little blue card sitting on top of it, like the one shown above. This card serves two purposes.

First, it tells customers which tables are ready. Nothing is left to be bussed, nothing needs to be cleaned - the table is ready for you. Easy enough.

Second, it tells the servers who needs attention. A server who sees a table with people sitting at it that still has a blue card knows that those guests have not yet been greeted or served. When the server comes to greet you, he or she simply grabs the card off of the table to let other servers know the guests have been greeted. So it prevents mistakes in a couple of different ways, and guests don’t even have to think about it.

Kudos to Switch. A little creativity can be a welcome surprise.

Normally, I have a healthy level of respect for the cats at Adaptive Path, but AP staffer Todd Wilkens chalked up a rather misguided post today on “Why usability is a path to failure”.

To his credit, Wilkens states:

“Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure. Usability is too low level, too focused on minutia. It can’t compel people to be interested in interacting with your product or service. It can’t make you compelling or really differentiate you from other organizations. Or put another way, there’s only so far you can get by streamlining the shopping cart on your website.”

Usability alone will definitely not compel people to invest time or money into your product. I agree with that part. What I find troubling is a different statement.

“So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up ‘usability’ as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a *different* place in my pants to put them on.”

Todd, we hold up usability as laudable because, sadly, most companies still have serious trouble putting their pants on correctly when it comes to usability. They need the gold stars.

Anyone in the interaction design or usability profession worth his salt knows that usability is a single piece of a very large “experience puzzle”. You need a strong value proposition to get users in the first place. You need a compelling product or service. You need good customer service when things go wrong. You need marketing prowess. You need something that makes you different, and better, than everyone else in your space.

For a product or service to be great, you need all these things. But you also need a usable touchpoint. A strong value proposition gets people interested in your product, but once you have their attention, a high level of usability helps motivate people to keep using it. A low level of usability deters people from using your product.

Usability helps beginning users become intermediates. Usability creates a good first impression. It helps people enjoy their experience. Usability is an investment in repeat business.

Usability is not a path to failure. Narrow-mindedness is a path to failure. Focusing all your efforts on usability means not doing all the other things that make a product great. Likewise, focusing all your efforts on the value proposition can mean putting out an unusable product.

You can’t focus on one thing. You have to focus on all of them.

If you haven’t yet decided to go to the “Voices That Matter” conference, I offer you a discount code, good for $100 off the cost of registration.

Just enter “WD-HOEK” as the priority code while registering.

Thanks to the folks at New Riders for offering this up.

From the IxDA list:

“The # 1 search term on our corporate intranet portal is “google”, even
though any user in the company can type “www.google.com” in the
address bar just a few inches above.”

You may think this sounds absurd, but it happens often. Our users always seem to do things in a way we never expect.

The idea here, for many users, is that they want to find something not on the intranet, and they know Google is the site they trust to do that. But they’re in the middle of thinking “I want to search“, not “I want to use Google”. So they use the intranet’s search field to search for Google. Yes, they could type the URL into the browser’s Address field, but it actually takes fewer keystrokes to enter the word “Google” into the search field and click on it in the search results.

Because I’ve seen users do thousands of things I would never have imagined, this makes perfect sense to me. I’ve gained enough experience to be able to “see” the web the way most typical users do. People outside the tech industry. People like your mother (or whoever is the perfect candidate for your “mother tests”).

But I’m continually reminded that most people inside the tech industry don’t understand how the rest of the world thinks while using a computer. So I see it as my job to pass on these little nuggets of truth. I hope you enjoy them.

If you haven’t yet figured out what conferences to attend in the next few months, you should definitely consider the “Voices That Matter” web design conference in October, presented by New Riders.

The rather amazing list of speakers features many of your favorite New Riders authors, including industry experts like:

• Dan Brown
• Andy Clarke
• Brendan Dawes
• Eric Meyer
• Dan Saffer
• Nathan Shedroff
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• my dear friend, CSS guru Stephanie Sullivan (whose book is not out yet)
• .. and me!

And if that’s not enough, web usability legend Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, is a featured speaker as well.

All these authors will be talking about things not covered in their books, so it’s a great chance to get some insights directly from these industry experts that you can’t get anywhere else.