Usable Usability Evaluation: If the Mountain Won't Come to Mohammed, Mohammed Must Go to the Mountain
1996
As an interaction and usability practitioner I have often been involved in usability evaluations that have given me the unpleasant feeling that the work has been a waste of time and money. This usually happens with evaluation requests for already developed (pre-)market versions of applications. The clients, being proud of their user-friendly product, see the usability evaluation as the finishing touch in the optimization of the application, and as a confirmation of their &s;user-centred&s; approach. However, the evaluation often shows that large improvements are necessary, even in the information structure. In the (pre-)market stage it is usually too late to do this. The result is that all people involved in the project are disappointed. The application designers are disappointed (and/or angry) because the evaluator may tell them that many things should have been designed differently. The team may have worked for a long time to produce the application, and a usability evaluator, looking around for just a few days, is able to run down the application completely. The willingness to accept such evaluation results is low. In my role as usability evaluator, I have also been disappointed, because only a few recommendations for improvement are executed, usually those concerning the information presentation, to camouflage the real problems. The client is also frustrated; the product appears to have many deficiencies even though it was produced by ·a team with a high level of expertise. Yet there have been no real complaints from users. Were the shortcomings real or was the evaluator simply a perfectionist? The client is also frustrated in that he has had to pay for a complete set of recommendations, only a part of which was useful at this stage.