[Sigia-l] Usability Testing

[Listera]

Will Parker:

> My bet is that you'll find that in the absence of a truly Jobsian or
> Tog-esque level of charisma on the usability team, PM's communication
> skills will have a stronger influence on the perceived success of the
> usability team than their location internal or external to the company.

Bingo.

Speaking of things Jobsian, can we, even for a moment, believe that all
these cellphones, smartphones, PDAs, and mobile devices up to now have *not*
gone through extensive "usability testing"? Of course they have. To the
collective tune of gazillions of dollars over the years. Has this produced
devices users just love? Of course not. Did it matter if they were tested by
internal or external usability teams? Not a bit. The design of these devices
have so far been utterly disjointed by hardware, software, service, carrier,
distribution, etc fiefdoms. They have been anything but examples of
integrated design processes.

Does it really matter an internal or external team tests a given taskflow if
the phone carrier eliminates it for lock-in purposes? Does it matter that
Motorola is willing and able to spend millions in designing advanced
hardware features if the underlying operating system can't properly support
them?

The Visual Voicemail in iPhone is useful because it *integrates* a fluid
multi-touch UI, a full-scale OS and a back-end server capability, among
other things. Now, Apple could test giving users the ability to arbitrarily
reorder voicemails to see if it resulted in operational efficiency or
cognitive overload. But does it really matter if this was done by an
internal or an external team *if* AT&T/Cingular servers could not be
redesigned to support it?

At the end, design is a holistic process. By limiting themselves to the
*output* of designers post facto, as opposed to *integrating* themselves
into the design process thereby informing it and perhaps even giving it
direction, the usability industry is shortchanging itself. But that's to be
expected from people too wedded to orthodoxy, best practices, deliverables
culture, titles, formalities, bureaucracy and such.

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem