Here's an interesting quote I came across today:

Usability is not everything.

If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other. Joel Spolsky

Actually I'd disagree ... Whether you design a website or a night club or a door handle, you have to consider your target users / audience.

There is a misconception about User Experience Design that if you religiously follow "best practices" you're going to design a great product. That is not true.

In some situations you'll get lucky and it might just work, but ultimately you need to understand what your users are trying to achieve in using, consuming or visiting your product.

If it is ordering a book onlinem then that's one thing. If they want to have a good time and their definition of a good time could be loud music, alcohol and dancing, then a lot of night clubs will cater for that.

But you can take this further. Think about the really popular clubs. Usually they provide something that their revelers want, whether it's a particular location, music, decor etc.

Ultimately someone sat down and thought hard about what people would like about their club, what others do not offer and then created it. Usually this spawns a lot of copy cats, but without a real understanding what they're copying they won't attract the same crowds.

So good club designers would exactly the same way as good user experience designers.

Now that would be a gig I'd be interested in doing!

Incidentally, here's an interesting article about the difference between copying and stealing design.

Generally people don't like change.

A sweeping statement, I know, but I fall into that category too (more often than I'd like to admit).

Humans, just like animals, are creatures of habit. We get used to something we like (sometimes even something we don't like) and when a change of that habit looms, we curl up in despair, crying "But why?".

I should be used to change. Or rather I am used to it.

I travel for work a lot, change projects every couple of months and I've live in a few countries and cities. So change does come quite naturally to me, but I do have to admit that once I get into certain habits I sometimes find it hard to let go of them. Whether that's restaurants, shops, clothes etc.

One place that is constantly changing and should be is the internet. Websites change their look and feel every couple of years, they introduce new features and generally users scream that the old was better.

Facebook is a particularly good example of that. The social networking site has evolved significantly from its first form of simple connected profile pages to the lets-share-and-document-our-entire-lives site it has become now.

So when it introduced the latest changes to its functionality, which turned its newsfeed into something more of a twitter-esque "who's doing what RIGHT NOW" source of information, users cried again that they wanted the old version back.

But they've done that before. Users have always come out in hordes saying how much they hate the new layout, but in the end they got on with and used to it and in the end quite like it. The introduction of the newsfeed in 2006 is probably the best example of that.

What they learned from that backlash is informing users of the upcoming changes and soliciting their feedback might actually be a good idea.

They did that for the last change when there was a significant front end overhaul, but not this time, which is strange.

Again, with all the people protesting right now, sooner or later people will just get on with it.

But it is interesting to note that if change is managed gradually, the transition is still bumpy, but a lot less rocky than if you go for the big bang approach.

Interacting with technology mostly takes place in front of a computer with a keyboard and a mouse or a mobile device such as a phone or a PDA.

But it doesn't have to be limited to that.

Large scale user interfaces that allow interaction of multiple users with their hands are not far away.

3D displays will make holograms a reality (download a video demo - WMV file).

Soon, any surface will become interactive, so posters will have multiple pages and can contain much more information, simply because we're not bound by pixel or print resolution.

Interaction design will have to adapt as new forms of haptic interactions will become the norm.

Wow, just wow ...