Sep 19 - Nielsen, Should Designers and Developers Do Usability? (Alertbox)

Should Designers and Developers Do Usability?

Summary: Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work.

Con: Specialization Drives Performance

We've known since Adam Smith that specialized workers are more productive than people who try to do everything. That's true in the user experience disciplines as well. You can't even talk about "designers" as a single group. There are graphic artists, interaction designers, information architects, writers, and many other professionals, each of whom specializes in designing some aspect of the total user experience. Sure, a single person can do both visuals and information architecture, but such efforts will rarely match the quality of work done by dedicated specialists.
Indeed, even usability professionals often specialize in usability subfields, such as quick qualitative studies, formal measurement studies, field studies, competitive studies, site analytics, surveys, guidelines and standards, and so on.

Pro: Less Staff Required

At many companies, the user experience teams are too small to justify a dedicated usability professional. Indeed, many project "teams" consist of a single person. Luckily, usability basics are easy enough to learn: we take team members through a simple user test of their design in a 3-day workshop.
Not having usability people is no reason not to have usability. Your team will benefit from doing some of the simpler usability activities itself, especially if following an Agile development process. Discount user testing can be done with minimal resources.

Con: Lack of Objectivity

If you test your own design, however, you might be less willing to admit its deficiencies. Designers can be too willing to dismiss user complaints or problems as minor or unrepresentative, when in fact the test indicates the need for a deep redesign.
One of the key things we teach in our user-testing courses is how to write good test tasks, because most novice test facilitators use the wrong tasks and get poor data as a result.
Designers are susceptible to employing tasks that focus almost exclusively on their own pet features rather than on goals that users really want to accomplish.

Pro: Higher Credibility, Easier Communication

When the same person does both design and usability, you don't have to worry about the designer dismissing the usability person's findings. People tend to believe in their own work!
When different people focus on different project aspects, they have to communicate, which takes time in meetings and time for report writing.
In contrast, when a designer runs a test, he or she knows what happened and can immediately start redesigning to fix the problems that the test identified. No meeting, no report, no communications overhead required, so long as the info is lodged within a single brain.

Conclusion
Any Test Is Better Than No Test
If you can afford it, it's better to have dedicated usability specialists perform your project's usability activities. But, the choice is not between this ideal and doing nothing. For many projects, there's a middle road: let the designers or the developers do double duty and take on some usability work. This is much better than having no usability at all.


source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, June 25, 2007:
Should Designers and Developers Do Usability?
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/own-usability.html
Should Designers and Developers Do Usability? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)