Well maybe not.

Without going overboard, it seems to us that usability (as currently understood) includes a great deal of baggage from the military minds who first coined the term in the 1970s. Their problem was discovering a method to ensure that recruits could navigate the complexities of complex electronic military hardware and the associated technical manuals.

At that time, the US Armed Forces were undergoing a radical transition. The draft, which kept a constant flow of white college educated workers in the pipeline, was ending. The military's vision of its future included lots of new employees with only moderate literacy. They were scared and more than subtly racist.

The earliest examples of usability improvements included the operating manual for the M-1 tank. Technical complexity was reduced to four ideas per page. The comic-book style was designed to be read in pictures, not text. Everything that could be simplified was. The message: please don't think, just look at the pictures. From a 100 page handout, the manual grew to over 3,500 pages. It was very easy to understand.

From there, usability evolved into a design discipline in the software industry. You may notice a certain sameness in software design. The principles of usability and usability testing, which have grown to include focus group style testing, produce a bland and universal output. The object is to deliver to the lowest common denominator.

The Engineering mind can be somewhat predictable. One of the rules of the game is that anything is better if it can be reduced to a formula or a procedure. In that regard, engineers share a lot of common ground with MBAs. It is predictable that the global Engineering community would embrace a view of usability that was formulaic. With their decidedly 20th Century mindsets, its no surprise that the Marketing and Sales communities have widely adopted the concept. After all, conventional usability testing looks and feels a lot like focus groups. The output resembles advertising taglines.

Cynicism, predictability and familiarity have conspired to deliver a view of the Web that is decidedly backward looking. As the "great unwashed" increasingly use the net with their virtually free PCs, we can only imagine that it will get worse. We're guessing that it will take web designers as long as it took the Military to understand that their fears are mostly groundless (about 25 years).

Until then, the usability of a website will have to strike a very difficult balance. To the extent that a web page evokes passion and engages the reader's heart, it has a very limited appeal. To the extent that it is usable (in the conventional sense), it is devoid of passion. From here it looks like you have to choose one or the other. Either optimize a page for broad consumption (dumb it down) or focus on a very tiny audience.

Interestingly, Recruiting, which demands the delivery of passion and engagement, may well be at the cutting edge of the evolution of usability tools.

The web creates a very intimate communications environment. While usability design is a necessary component, building on the mediums' inherent "heat" is a critical piece of wildly successful Recruiting. This means that Recruiters ought to be better at using the Web to accomplish both objectives.

In short, we think that the kinds of improvements suggested by conventional usability consultants are an important starting point. But, they are only a beginning. Learning to use the Web to convey just the right message to just the right person is a step beyond the conventional. It involves constant improvement and an eye towards perfection.

- John Sumser