scottmacleodsblog

The more I’m involved with usability, the more I appreciate the, now well-worn, phrase “It Depends”. Steve Krug mentions in his book “Don’t Make Me Think” that one usability practice firm has t-shirts with that phrase. I also, have had t-shirts made with that phrase. I wear one every time I’m assigned to a new manager who isn’t familiar with usability (every new manager, except one, out of six, so far). Trite as it’s perhaps become, many many people still need to hear it.

Case in point is our Week 2 written assignment in IAKM 60104. The facts for the case study are (intentionally I’m sure) ambiguous. As a result, your answer to which usability method is appropriate will probably sound like some version of “it depends whether…..”.

So we were supposed to choose between, and justify, formative versus summative usability tests. Which you chose is less important than the thinking behind why you chose what you chose, so it’s a good assignment. I love ambiguity.

What I don’t love is when new disciplines (like usability, at least when it was still a new discipline) can’t make the effort to come up with terms that are useful and original to the discipline (in what other time-frame of the discipline do you get this great chance!!!???) and instead borrow crappy terms from other disciplines (learning theory….are you sure?). So usability decided to use Formative and Summative. The titles say it….uh, not at all. Exploratory and Validation WIN OUT. Thank you Rubin & Chisnell. Rant ends.

This is the first week of my third course in the Master’s in User Experience Design at Kent State, and it’s been a very tough assignment. This blog post is part of it. There are many more students in this course than in the two previous courses, or so it seems. Just keeping up on the posts in the discussion thread takes hours. I’ve finally finished the reading and the first week’s writing assignment, and still need to contribute my own post to the discussion board.

This course is, as you can tell from the title for this post, an introduction to the subject of Usability. It’s interesting because it’s been about four years since I was introduced by a colleague at work to Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. It’s weird how books can change your life. Reading DMMT opened a new world to me, one that I had never even heard of before. As in Frost’s poem, that has made all the difference. I changed my career as a result of DMMT (and other equally life-changing books like Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things) but, unlike Frost’s poem, I’m not telling this with a sigh.