[Sigia-l] Usability Testing comments from Giga

[Thomas Vander Wal]

John O'Donovan wrote:

>>i think we diverged at some point in this conversation.
>>    
>>
>
>Agreed. I got a bit slap happy there.
>
>I think the original post polarises the situation and comes down to a much
>more fundamental issue - how much weight does a usability review have in
>comparison to the Designer / IA / UX expert viewpoint?
>  
>
 From an observed client perspective usability has a perceived weight, 
largely because it has been visable thanks to the Jakob and others.  The 
designers came out at the bottom of this as usability was largely fueled 
by the "look what designers have done to us" mindset, which focussed on 
unusable interfaces.  

I have a few clients that currently are followers of the Kult of Jakob 
and they will pull Jakobian rants and demand we do what Jakob suggests. 
 But when we test (yes I said test -- often gorrila testing) we find the 
users do not completely agree with Jakob and are not attracted to a 
Jakobian site.  

The power of knowing how to test helps any usability, IA, UX, 
U-of-the-day validate their work with actual users.  Not counting 
testing I think the usability folks have an edge, but having the Polar 
Bear book and Christina's Blueprints helps the IA profession greatly. 
 Books help, respected books that have some traction outside their 
profession and are understandable by the non-iniated help greatly.  

Having the ability to put our work in terms that decision makers can 
understand is extremely helpful.  Navigation, ontologies, and scent of 
information all get eye glaze.  I have been playing with and using 
attraction as a framework to discribe the need to understand the 
vocabularly of the users and work to develop sites that have not only 
linguistic elements the users understand and are drawn to, but 
attracting the scenses (visual and auditory).  Usability reviews often 
rely on the well known gurus and/or research, as IA gets traction we can 
have the same weight, but it will take hard work and time.

All the best,
Thomas