Testing, testing

Rob Waller: 08 October 2009 in Opinions

A debate has broken out in the pages of Design Week, a magazine for professional designers, about user-testing. A piece by Anna Richardson in the 6 August issue discussed the needs for pictograms to evolve with the modern world, and cited the efforts of several designers to come up with a greater variety of images to match the variety of typefaces that designers can choose from. Pictograms are those small symbols used in road signs or buildings to say 'railway crossing', 'lost luggage', 'lifts', or 'toilets'.

This drew a response in the form of a letter from ergonomics expert Gary Davis, who pointed out that new pictograms should be tested with their users, and that an ISO standard exists for such tests. In fact he went a bit further than this.

Davis seemed to question the judgement of professional designers, quoting the original article in which type designer Bruno Maag gives what I think is an important caveat, that new pictograms must be 'structurally recognisable and close to the established standard'. But Davis's response - 'who makes that judgement? Not the designer that's for sure' - drew this reaction from Maag: 'This is a dangerous and possibly insulting statement, as it completely belittles our work and our professionalism'.

I don't believe Davis really meant to exclude designers from the process altogether - I know his work and I think this was probably an example of 'mis-speaking'. But this kind of heated language is a classic sign of incompatible paradigms (think creation and evolution).

Actually this debate has been going on ever since I can remember. In fact, my first ever publication was as second author with Michael Macdonald-Ross of a paper entitled 'Criticism, alternatives and tests' in 1975. We argued that the often intuitive but real expertise of designers had to be combined with the objectivity of testing to make progress in information design. You need creative leaps, and critical judgement, but you also need to try them out in a systematic way with the people who will use the design.

Ofgem recently published proposals for informing customers better about the relative value they were getting from their energy suppliers. They tested a range of formats for a table that might appear on electricity bills, and I find it hard to believe a professional designer was involved in their creation. You can find these on the Ofgem website here.

Here's an example - I can't help feeling that professional designers might have been of some help, and I'm going to set this as a project for our MA Information Design students in a few weeks time. Of course, they'll test the ideas they come up with, so hopefully both Maag and Davis would be happy.