The unfulfilled promise of usability engineering
Dennis R. Wixon · 2011
Usability practitioners have always shared at least one common goal—create the best possible product or tool with the time and resources provided. How to most effectively achieve that goal has been and will continue to be an essential question for us. Today there are a number of promising frameworks and effective heuristics. There is also a body of experience that we can draw on. This was less true 30 years ago when some of us started. In those days, many of us came from a background in academic research. While that background provided the foundation for much of the work that followed, it was critical to adapt that foundation to the context of hardware and software development and interface design. In adapting that foundation some assumptions and practices could be built upon and others needed to be abandoned. In this essay, I examine the