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

[Listera]

Dave:

> 1. What is different about the web?... What I see as intrisically different is
> the hap-hazardness of the experience,

I know where you're coming from on this, except that "haphazardness of the
experience" is certainly not exclusive to web apps/sites. A shameful
percentage of non-web apps suffer from the very same malady; just pick a
large corp at random and checkout their intranet apps. There's nothing
intrinsic to the web that forces one to create a haphazard experience, even
when accounting for its limited widget set and request-response loop. Bad
designers are quite capable of generating nonsense in either medium; the
ease of entry and access happen to be much easier on the web so you probably
observe more there.

I think what's new with the web is the enormous degree to which content
space and the application/presentation/workflow space can be so tightly
intertwined. Sometimes it's hard to tell for the user that he's navigating
an actual application (with a complex backend infrastructure)...and that's
exactly the point. The app recedes into the background and the functionality
flows through in many disguises. That's generally new, exciting and
powerful.

> 2. Usability is useless b/c where in the design process it exists for
> too many organizations, at the end.

I wish more people would say that and more often. When I mock "usability
engineers" in white lab coats here, I get a lot of flack on/off the list,
mostly from folk in the usability testing business. It's often not a
specific criticism of what they do, but the notion of factoring usability
out of the central position it should occupy within design and relegating it
to pre-shipment and/or post-production afterthought, "delivered" from
outside by (essentially) strangers. (I'm not saying botched designs cannot
or should not be rescued. Rather that the practice of regarding usability as
a separate/disjointed/reactive part of design should be condemned.)

> The question I have is, "Is the web really all that different?"

Not if your application can consume all what the web can offer and, in turn,
can communicate with it back.

> Wouldn't those same contextual cues be just as valuable to appliction
> design as to web design? Isn't it all really software?

Absolutely. I can't tell you just how excited I got the first time I dropped
in a web rendering engine framework on a non-web app and began to
programmatically control every move, pixel, link, character, movie, etc., on
it, just as I normally do any other widget.
 
> If the title was, how to make usability more useful it might have been
> a tad more acceptable. ;)

Usability testing is like saying thank you to someone for doing their job.
We should assume usability, as part of Design (cap "D") and move on.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba