Focus of Our Usability Discussion

I think Pete offers us a good, controversial starting point for discussion. Here’s part of his good post to the blog:“So that's my take on World Usability Day, making usability work online. We don't have to anymore. The users have become the designers, the testers, and the center. Just like in Robert Johnson's User-Centered Design, the users have taken over.”

My reaction, as a web developer and a usability engineer, is this is really romanticizing Web 2.0. To continue with the soulja motif, let me say, “it ain’t all that and a bag o’ chips.” It just isn’t that completely organic that users have absolute control of the environment. There are elements that have been contrived, in structure, in layout, in the system itself, that are beyond their control and that do impact their use of the said system.Users do with web 2.0 have increased control, can contribute content, even manipulate to a certain degree the look and feel of their system interface, but not to such a degree that the system becomes organically an extension of their own body system.

The fact is that as long as a system, a software, or a product is built by others for the use of others, usability must be assessed, must be made part of the iterative process of modifying the system, software, or product.

Now does Web 2.0 enable the user to have more of a say in usability? In theory perhaps it does. But in theory is the need for usability assessment done away with because the system in use has been designed by users for users? I really think the answer is no. Now this may mean that external usability assessment, more heuristic in nature, is less necessary or useful, but I've always questioned its inherent value anyway. But it does not mean that usability assessment of some kind should not occur.

If the argument is that this will naturally happen in an evolutionary, adaptive way because people are designers and users of the same thing, that, therefore, usability and development are naturally tied up together and so do not require any formal methods of assessment, then I guess that’s a strain of discussion to explore. But predicating this possibility, among other things, is that Web 2.0 is an organic system, product of and producer for the individual user. Again, that just isn’t the case.

So for me a more interesting theoretical as well as practical discussion (and that’s what we do—theory and praxis) is one in which we discuss the modifications, new methodological approaches necessary to make usability assessment useful in the Web 2.0 environment. We don’t want to do away with a means of assessment that right now is generally underused if not misused. How do we establish qualitative rigor when assessing the usability of Web 2.0?

The purpose of this discussion, and, as a reminder, one that pays some of the bills, is to focus on usability testing and the teaching of it in an online environment. We have a real opportunity here to make a mark on the subject, and we should take the lead in doing so.

How should usability assessment be adapted to it? How can we get usability to be more embraced in our field as a method of research and assessment? With regard to teaching usability, how can we effectively carry over to the online classroom what we do now in the lab?