There’s a disturbing trend emerging in the world of usability. More and more, clients are conducting their own “usability” tests and claiming those tests justify what is clearly a suboptimal, or even unusable, design. Equally unnerving is their conviction about the longevity of these results; once they’ve “done usability”, they can’t be persuaded to re-open discussion on the topic. Putting aside the initial and obvious question of why they hired me to conduct a usability assessment, I’ve been left to ponder the larger question:

Why has this trend surfaced?

And the answer that occurred to me is based on scenarios I encountered circa 1998 when I talked to people about why they needed to take the Internet more seriously. At the time, many people I spoke with didn’t understand the Internet or the opportunity it presented. Thus, they preferred to treat it like a “checkbox” item. While few of these people would admit it now or then, their actions belied a thought process that looked like this:

“Do we have a web site?”

“Yes.”

“We can check that off our list then.”

The problem with this process, of course, was that not all web sites were (or are) created equal, a lesson which has only recently become conventional wisdom. Companies and the individuals responsible for web sites now generally understand that to compete successfully in the online space they have to provide a decent online user experience with a design that reflects how people really use the Web.

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