[Sigia-l] Usability testing into the dustbin?

[Mitchell Gass]

At 07:28 PM 5/1/2003 -0400, Boniface Lau wrote:
> > When something better than current diagnostic usability testing
> > comes along, I hope that all design teams embrace it.
>
>There is. It is called "usability by design"...However, embracing 
>"usability by design" requires self-discipline and a much higher skill 
>level from design team members.

The belief that there could be a design method so perfect that it would not 
benefit from the involvement of users at the end I find astonishing. I have 
never been involved with any usability testing where we weren't surprised 
by what we learned. It is rare that we don't get slap-on-the-forehead, "why 
didn't any of us this think of that?" insights that dramatically improve a 
product. In the design of almost any information technology, there are so 
many details and so much to know about users and the context of their 
activities that we can't hope to get everything right the first time. Our 
users can be a big help.

When I read that "a much higher skill level" will be required for improving 
design, I have to ask: is this skill the ability to use new and better 
design techniques, or does it also include knowledge, acknowledged or not, 
about users and the context of their activities? There are extraordinarily 
observant and insightful people who bring vast knowledge of people and 
their activities to design, and no doubt many of them can produce 
outstanding designs without further involvement from the people they're 
designing for. But I wouldn't bet the future of design that there are 
enough of them.

Related to this: an interesting paper at this year's CHI conference, 
"Design-Oriented Human-Computer Interaction," discussed three competing 
accounts of what design is: one that author Daniel Fallman calls the 
"conservative," which is allied with natural sciences; another the 
"romantic," allied with art, poetry, and music; and another the 
"pragmatic," allied with the social sciences. A draft version is at

   http://daniel-pc.informatik.umu.se/resources/papers/p348-fallman-draft.pdf

Mitchell Gass
uLab | PDA: Learning from Users | Designing with Users
Berkeley, CA 94707 USA
+1 510 525-6864 voice
+1 510 525-4246 fax
http://www.participatorydesign.com/