[Sigia-l] Usability Testing comments from Giga

[Listera]

"Jared M. Spool" wrote:

> While an experienced navigator can trust his gut to say that the ship is on
> course, having instruments to verify position, speed, and conditions gives
> everyone on board the confidence needed.

Speaking of one of my favorite subjects, for millennia perhaps the most
significant barrier to the discovery of our planet, the oceans, the
continents, etc., was not ignorance but the delusion of knowledge. The
Church gave us the 'ideal' map, the working seamen gave us portolanos,
harbor guides. Guess which one you'd consult if you were a captain of a
caravel off the cost of East Africa? I'm decidedly not against testing.
However...

> This is all about confidence -- trusting that we have the underlying
> knowledge, practices, and methodologies to produce reliably effective
> results every time.

...IA is not a profession where every result can be reliably and predictably
'engineered' from a codified set of rules. I don't think that's even needed.
In an incredibly fast moving platform of technology and development, we (try
to) deliver efficient (and hopefully enjoyable) results.

Furthermore, I predict IA will never attain the 'scientific' status some
hope to achieve. IA is just as much a craft as medicine has been and is
today. As I provided earlier, we've come from days of autopsies being done
by barbers to fantastic technological medical achievements. Medicine is one
of the most highly regulated, licensed and tested professions around. And
yet 50% of what doctors know today are invalid. So white lab coats are not
enough and to the extent that they may obscure the forest for the trees they
may even be detrimental in certain ways.

> Ziya asked an important question: does every decision need to be tested.

The context I uttered what you paraphrased above was in reaction to an
assertion that someone would test what he was sure of, as well as what he
was not. That's simply not attainable in the commercial world: there just
isn't the money, resources, time and personnel for that. You'd have to be in
the testing business to advocate that :-) That's why I gave the example of a
doctor not testing everything during his practice, otherwise he'd have no
practice in short order.

> Today, our confidence is weak.

I don't find that.

To me, the basic tenets of IA have been in practice for centuries. The use
of the title may have gained currency with the birth of the web in general,
but as I pointed out previously, what Mercator did with cartography or what
Ray and Linnaeus did with the taxonomy of species was nothing less than IA.
If you take a historical view, I think there's less reason for panic or
gloom. :-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba