[Sigia-l] 90% of All Usability Testing is Useless

[Dave]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 16:42:49 -0700, Richard Law <rlaw at cisco.com> wrote:
> 
> Let the discussion begin... ;.)
> http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000328.php

Nice overstatement for the sake of provocation. But as someone who
lives his life loving to do just that I will try to only react to what
I've interpretted to be the key points, and they are points that I
agree with.

1. What is different about the web? Lane doesn't go into an
explanation about why the web is different from software or other
interactions. But let me try to help out here. First there is a
continuum, so please don't consider this an absolute, but b/c the web
is primarily for information consumption and is not in and of itself a
"task-driven" action per se. Of course this can be argued that no one
goes anywhere w/o a task-motivation, but for the purpose of discussion
here, just bear w/ me. What I see as intrisically different is the
hap-hazardness of the experience, that the overarching context of
web-use is one that is more visceral than application use and it is
this context that drives much of the understanding that is needed to
make an application usable. Laboratory testing that is task focused
can't achieve this level of understanding, so Lane is offering a small
approach to encourage us to engage the user at several different
levels.

2. Usability is useless b/c where in the design process it exists for
too many organizations, at the end. It is used as a purely QA device,
when it is really necessary and most useful as part of the early
design process, in order to validate early conception, as opposed to
final deliverable. lets acknowledge that many of us do try to do this,
but that many more are not able to.

The question I have is, "Is the web really all that different?"
Wouldn't those same contextual cues be just as valuable to appliction
design as to web design? Isn't it all really software?

If the title was, how to make usability more useful it might have been
a tad more acceptable. ;)

-- dave

ps. I liked the article enough to send it to my higher-ups. :)