On 3/6/08 7:25 PM, "ext Andrei Herasimchuk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The biggest problem you're going to run into is one of the usability > field's own making to a certain degree. That is, usability is as much > if not more about research as it is about evaluation, which most > translate as "testing" unfortunately.
These things easily become a matter of semantics, but this is my impression as well. Further, many discussions are held with people whose work may not involve usability/design factors by nature and the view thusly differs a lot from those of the practitioners of usability/design. But back to the original question. Personally I find little use of discussing about terms or semantics in daily work when your team already knows what their mandate is. Projects I've dealt with can be divided roughly into these steps*: 1) Focus 2) User research 3) Design 4) Implementation 5) Evaluation 6) Go to 1 In practice, user research is highly involved in steps 2 and 3 whereas "usability evaluation" comes to play during 3, 4 and 5. Step 5, evaluation, has little use if you don't use it for anything, but if you do, it can make afterlife easier and provides personal growth opportunities. Usability in broader sense, is ingrained throughout the process. How it manifests itself differs a lot. For example, in design phase we can predict problems that the design may face and design accordingly. While implementing we start to see how our designs work in practice, and most of the time there will be changes because of chances you've taken or due to technical "surprises". Evaluation can pinpoint what the real pain-points for the users really are. In good team (personal opinion), usability is there all the time in form of people working on the project. In such case there is no point to have a flow chart box with usability label on it. Best regards, Janne Kaasalainen Interaction Designer / Nokia Research Center * Naturally, this does not honor the engineers involved in projects but that's a discussion for a different email. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
