Usability Marches Backwards
“BBC titan Lord Reith, will you give the people what they want?”
Usability to often is asking the question – and being surprised by the response.
All too often usability evaluations are conducted on products and services already in the marketplace. This is fine for the evaluator to get an idea of the landscape – but for innovative research this is ineffective. Why? Customers, participants, and informants do not have the same information as the design team, the engineering team, or the business team.
They can only comment on what is known – the artifact they’re evaluating. They can make minor recommendations, but will not inspire the team to innovate.
To innovate, we need to stop evaluating what exists and start evaluting ideas, sketches, and prototypes.
As McLuhan delcared decades ago:
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
