Gandhiji's Perspective of Pluralistic Usability

“I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number.
It means in its nakedness that in order to observe the supposed good of fifty-one percent,the interest of forty nine percent may be or should be sacrificed.
It is a heartless doctrine and has done harm to humanity.The only real dignified human doctrine is the greatest good of all.” Mahatma Gandhi

If the essence of this quote is applied to present state of usability practices, it reveals the weakness of statistics based design decisions taken during user testing and feedback sessions. From the perspective of usability experts or designers, it is very convenient to justify design decisions based on what majority of users demanded. Such user feedback is often very representative and based on tiny sample of users. But in the light of Gandhiji’s quote, it is quite possible that one might be doing gross injustice to users in minority proportion.

This thought gives rise to the idea of ‘pluralistic usability’ wherein the concerns, design expectations, requirements of ‘not just the representative sample of users’ or ‘not just the majority of users’ but ‘all the users’ need to be considered. It reaffirms the challenge of user study involving diverse dimensions of users such as physical, mental, educational, professional, linguistic, social, cultural,religious, historical, political, geographical and what not. Such exhaustive user study is paramount for any software product design activity. The techniques and methods need to be designed to transcend the geographic barriers for reaching out to users. One may consider reading my small experimentation of reaching out to large number of users through remote usability. At the same time, one has to appreciate the fact that software products need to be designed, developed and delivered in a resource bound format. Also one needs to understand the meaning of ‘pluralistic usability’ within the scope of software and its targeted users. There could be one solution with lot of customizability or many different solutions for addressing the plurality of users. The designers may or may not succeed in designing for all users in literal sense; but feeling the gravity and magnitude of this challenge, can show us our limitations; and motivate us to push these limiting boundaries further.

Afterthoughts:

* There is scope of new exploration in the contradiction between ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’ (the approach followed in usability testing) and ‘the greatest good of all’ (I understand this as the real goal of pluralistic usability). Actually, what we do in ‘participatory design approach’ is also a form of democratization. It is intended to win acceptance from diverse people (users in our context).

* The greatest good of all’ isn’t really an impossible ideal. The wide range of customizable features (often not provided in a very usable manner) offered in the software products are meant to address the needs of different kinds of users. It is an effort to achieve ‘the greatest good of all’ within the limits of targeted users of the given product. The professionals are already inching towards this goal though not knowing that Gandhiji has already worded it so profoundly. It leaves no place for 80-20, 51-49 or whatever percentages.

* The interesting thing is Gandhiji said something 5/6 decades back, which is so profound and so fitting in our context of usability.

* After all, isn’t usability meant to liberate the users from usability problems….