Sep 18 - Nielsen, Misconceptions about Usability (Alertbox)

Misconceptions About Usability

My comments: In this short article, Jakob Nielsen deliberated on the 4 common misconceptions about Usability. This is good to be included in my Literature Review part of my PhD dissertation.

Summary: Misconceptions about usability's expense, the time it involves, and its creative impact prevent companies from getting crucial user data, as does the erroneous belief that existing customer-feedback methods are a valid driver for interface design.

Usability Is Expensive

Yes, big computer companies have been known to invest in million-dollar usability labs. Yes, experienced usability professionals are very highly paid. And yes, large-scale user testing to compare multiple design alternatives across several countries can cost $200,000 or more.
But most everyday usability projects are cheap. Small companies don't need labs; you can run user tests in a spare conference room. Rather than hiring expensive usability professionals with ten years' experience, you can teach existing staff how to conduct studies. And, even though international studies are great, you don't start there: just spend a few days testing five domestic customers.
Even with a budget of $200, you can do usability. The methods are incredibly flexible and scale up or down according to circumstance. On average, best practices call for spending 10% of a design budget on usability.

Usability Engineering Will Delay My Launch Date

Usability need not be grandiose. The simplest user testing method I recommend takes three days, but even faster tests are possible -- especially if you use methods like paper prototyping, which lets you crank through new design iterations in a few hours.

Usability Kills Creativity

Design is basically problem solving under constraints: you must design a system that can actually be built, that's within budget, and that works in the real world. Usability adds one more constraint: the system must be relatively easy for people to use.
All usability does is to make them explicit so that you can account for them in your design. Usability guidelines tell you how people typically behave with similar designs. User testing tells you how people behave with your proposed design.

We Don't Need Usability, We Already Listen to Customer Feedback

Market research methods such as focus groups and customer satisfaction surveys are great at researching your positioning or which messages to choose for an advertising campaign. They are not good at deciding user interface questions -- in fact, they're often misleading.
Seeing something demo'd and actually having to use it are two very different things.


source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, September 8, 2003:
Misconceptions About Usability
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030908.html
Misconceptions About Usability (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)