The occasional light expression

Jared Spool’s article “Surviving our success: 3 radical recommendations” in last month’s Journal of Usability Studies is a nice quick read.

He proposes 3 recommendations to deal with a common problem (backed by studies such as by Rolf Molich) that CEOs point to — UE findings by supposed experts can be very variable depending on who conducts the evaluations.

Among usability studies conducted by dozens of ‘credible’ teams across the world, Molich found that usability studies on everyday products such as Hotmail and the Flash based Hotel Penn website (which is a favorite hiring ‘test’ for some firms) had a lot of variation in what experts thought of as ‘catastrophic’ issues. Very few of the teams that conducted the usability studies had similarities on what they thought were P1 issues.

Here are Spool’s 3 radical recommendations – perhaps worth a thought:

1.    Stop Making Recommendations
2.    Stop conducting evaluations
3.    Seek out new techniques

Read the paper to see the details on these recommendations – they’re not as controversial as they appear!

A few days back I finally finished the Black Swan - a rigorous and empirically skeptical (and darkly humorous) take on randomness, stock markets, experts, and life. I enjoyed the contents of the book as much as trying to read into the genius mind of Nassim Nicholas Taleb - a practitioner with sound footing in theory. Mr. Taleb is a genius no less and also bold and relentless with little tolerance for fools and financial ‘experts’.