[IxDA Discuss] When those who know little about Usability offerUsability Services

[Peter Boersma]

Alan asked:
> [..] However after talking to them for a while it becomes clear that 
> they really don't know what Usability is [..]
> So I ask you: Is this the price we pay for growing popularity of 
> Usability and User-Centered Design?

Yes, and we should fight it with (drumroll...) discount usability methods.
Jakob Nielsen wrote an article on Guerrilla HCI in 1994:

Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier
"I used the term "guerrilla HCI" in the title [..] because I believe that simplified usability methods can be a way for a company to gradually build up its reliance on systematic usability methods, starting with the bare minimum and gradually progressing to a more refined lifecycle approach."
(http://www.useit.com/papers/guerrilla_hci.html)

If these simplified methods come to the people with less knowledge in a well-documented and illustrated way, there is hope that they won't mess it up and bring our practice down again.

And, since this is IxDA and not CHI-Web, I believe each field under the UX umbrella should have its own set of simplified methods, as I explained for IAs on my blog in "A piece of IA pie: little, micro, lite or guerrilla?" (http://www.peterboersma.com/blog/2005/02/piece-of-ia-pie-little-micro-lite-or.html or http://tinyurl.com/c7tw4).
IxDA.org's Resource Library (http://resources.ixda.org/) and the IA Institute's Learning IA section (http://www.iainstitute.org/en/learn/) should be examples of collections of these well-documented, simplified methods.

Peter
-- 
Peter Boersma | Senior Interaction Designer | Info.nl
http://www.peterboersma.com/blog | http://www.info.nl