Gone in a Flash: Why E-Com firms are in flat line mode Over the past 25 years, I have worked in a special field of research known generally as "usability engineering." This relatively new science is focused on determining in objective terms why products, systems and, most recently, web sites are confusing and difficult to learn and use. Over the past 5 years, I have often been retained to conduct independent evaluations of web sites designed by many of the "e-commerce" development firms whose stock prices, even by current market valuations, have gone into "flat line mode." There is more to this fall than meets the eye. To a great extent, these firms were populated by well meaning young designers who worked without the benefit of either scientific method or engineering process. The skill set that these firms brought to the Internet development space was, by in large, based on a graphic design education and rarely on any comprehensive understanding of the cognitive sciences. If the field of human factors engineering research has taught us anything in the last 50 years, it is that human needs and limitations, not visual style, must drive complex technology solutions. Whether a web site is engaging and usable is determined by human psychology and physiology and not the desire of designers to create a visually engaging first impression. It is clear that a significant portion of the current disastrous stock valuations of these firms was caused by designers who gave clients the impression that they knew what they were doing by producing materials that were visually full and cognitively empty. I cannot tell you the number of clever flow diagrams, engaging process charts, navigation flows, and all manner of Photoshop and Flash demos I have seen. In many cases, clients paid millions of dollars for material that was 99% "puff". When such seemingly "professional" recommendations were implemented by well meaning clients, they produced sites so unusable and counter-intuitive that literally, half of those who purposefully visited these sites could not purchase or transact. Based on what I have seen over the last 5 years, it is clear that doing development on "Internet time" was simply an excuse to ignore all that has been learned from the management sciences over the last 75 years. Creating an engaging and psychologically meaningful screen-based consumer experience is an extraordinarily complex problem. Such problems will not yield one inch to "design-art" based problem solving. No matter how much money venture capitalists throw at these firms, the problem has and will elude those who try to sell interaction "art" as interaction "science". Thus I view the current valuations of the "e-commerce" web development agencies as marking the end of WWW 1.0. It is now time to get down to business. And the business will be based on the formal application of rigorous "human-centered" development methods and proven engineering and implementation process models. In spite of how quickly the new development tools of the Internet allow us to create concepts, such tools add little to our understanding of what makes a web experience truly "engaging". Yes, it does take real time, not Internet time, to solve such problems. Certainly there will be a place for the "design arts" in the future of the web. However, clearly we cannot ride a scooter into the next century. Charles L. Mauro July 25, 2001 Email the editor with any questions or comments.