

The Myth of Usability Testing - phsr
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-myth-of-usability-testing/

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ugh
“Usability Testing: It’s not a Myth”, a reply from Lukas Mathis:
[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/20/usability_testing_n...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/20/usability_testing_not_a_myth/)

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blasdel
If you follow his reasoning, the logical conclusion is to ditch all the
sociological hand-waving with asking people whether they feel good using the
software and focus on the hard results -- productivity, conversions, etc.

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spokey
There's a lot of good advice there about asking the right questions of the
right people, but I don't think it is fair to assert that because different
teams came up with different problems the usablity tests were a failure.
Consider the possiblity that each did really did uncover unique serious
problems. The goal of UX testing shouldn't be to identify all the problems but
some of the serious ones. Test, change and iterate. Once you've addressed a
few of the top issues the context of the application has changed anyway.

(Also, I wish there was more detail on the individual tests. This sounds like
an interesting experiment.)

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sp332
Maybe the user interfaces totally sucked, and the teams only had time to
uncover and report on a percentage of them. Having seen the old Hotmail
webpage, I think this is likely.

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timcederman
_Contrary to claims that usability professionals operate scientifically to
identify problems in an interface_

Who claims that? I think usability testing is one of the most subjective
practices out there.

Oh right, the author of this article (and the authors of the previous studies
too!) is muddying the waters of what is "usability testing" and "usability
evaluation".

Usability testing normally implies testing with a user. This sounds like all
these studies were heuristic evaluations. If everyone had the same set of
heuristics/best practices, then yes, it would be surprising for there to be a
difference.

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omouse
This is precisely why Gladwell's books are dangerous. He may say that he wants
to inspire people to learn and think more, but he uses sloppy methods.

In this blog post, the writer uses Gladwell's shaky arguments to support their
own ideas.

