The Rise of Website Usability
Website usability didn't start with the web: it grew out of decades of human-computer interaction research that found a mainstream audience in the late 1990s.
Website usability as a discipline is older than the web itself. Its roots sit in human-computer interaction research from the 1980s, most visibly in Don Norman’s 1988 book “The Design of Everyday Things,” which argued that when people struggle to use a product, the fault usually lies with the design, not the user. That idea, applied later to software and then to websites, is the seed everything else grew from.
From software labs to the web
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, usability testing lived mostly inside large software companies. Firms like IBM and Microsoft ran formal usability labs, watching people attempt tasks on prototype interfaces and refining designs based on where they got stuck. Jakob Nielsen, then a researcher at Sun Microsystems, published “Usability Engineering” in 1993, distilling much of that lab-based practice into methods that smaller teams could apply without a dedicated lab: heuristic evaluation, discount usability testing with a handful of participants and iterative design.
When the web arrived as a mass consumer medium in the mid-1990s, that body of knowledge had somewhere new to go. Nielsen started his Alertbox column in 1995, translating usability engineering principles specifically for websites at a moment when almost nobody else was writing about the topic in public. It became one of the most widely read sources on web design of the decade, not because it was flashy, but because it kept being right about what made people abandon a page.
A discipline finds its footing
The turning point for usability as an independent field came in 1998, when Nielsen partnered with Don Norman to found the Nielsen Norman Group. Two of the most credentialed researchers in human-computer interaction putting their names on a consulting practice signaled something important: usability wasn’t a hobby or a design footnote, it was a professional discipline that companies could hire for, with its own methods and its own track record.
At the same time, the growing commercial stakes of the web gave usability research an urgency it hadn’t had in the software-lab era. Amazon’s move to patent one-click ordering, granted in September 1999, is a good marker of how far the thinking had come: reducing a purchase to a single click wasn’t a UI flourish, it was recognized as a competitive advantage worth defending legally. Retailers were starting to understand that every extra step between a visitor and a completed purchase was a place to lose that visitor.
Where it stood by 1999
By 1999, usability had gone from an academic and internal-lab concern to something businesses could point to, hire consultants for and measure their own sites against. It still hadn’t fully penetrated marketing departments, most usability thinking still lived with designers and engineers, but the vocabulary and the research base were established, and the arrival of serious e-commerce traffic was about to force the rest of the business to pay attention.
The rise of website usability wasn’t a single invention or launch. It was two decades of human-computer interaction research finding a much bigger audience the moment the web gave it one, and 1999 is the year that convergence became impossible to ignore.
Browse more Marketing Analytics coverage or see everything published in 1999.
