Foreword

Have you ever heard the sayings “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” or “The plumber has leaky faucets”? Have you smiled at them, assuring yourself that most usability professionals are far above such trivial, conventional problems?

I have bad and good news for you.

The bad news is that my research shows that a considerable number of products produced by usability professionals are hard to use or don’t meet their users’ needs. I’ve encountered unusable usability test reports, unusable personas, unusable interview reports, and unusable websites of companies who sell usability services. And even worse than that: some of us are not very good at selling and communicating our knowledge and our deliverables to people who are not usability professionals.

The good news is that some people are starting to discuss these problems openly. The book that you have in your hands right now, It’s Our Research, is one of the important milestones on the road to making usability products truly usable and increasing their impact.

As good usability professionals, we must respect and follow the rules that we preach to others, including knowing your users, designing with your users, and iterating.

By “users,” I don’t mean end users. End users are very important, of course. But even more important for your success are the direct users of your deliverables: the development team, the marketing team, your management team, and so on.

Usability is maturing. Twenty years ago, Joe Dumas, Ginny Redish, and Jeffrey Rubin advanced the usability testing field when they almost simultaneously published A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (Dumas and Redish, originally published in 1993) and The Handbook of Usability Testing (Rubin, 1994).

Today, I have a whole bookshelf of literature about usability testing and user research. Specialized usability testing books like Moderating Usability Tests by Dumas and Loring (2008) and Remote Research by Bolt and Tulathimutte (2010) are starting to appear, indicating the need for our services.

But it’s not just the usability profession that is maturing. The consumers of usability products are maturing, too. Some of our users are getting so mature that they no longer accept just anything in the name of usability. They demand quality. In response to bad experiences with professional usability services, they define rigorous and reasonable standards for usability testing, expert reviews, interviews, personas, and more. They set up extensive quality assurance programs to ensure that they get what they pay for. You can no longer do whatever you want in the name of usability.

It’s a widespread myth that people who criticize usability are evil or irrational enemies of a good cause. Sure, I’ve met people who fanatically believed things like, “Cowboy programmers don’t need no stinkin’ usability,” or “If it was hard to code, it must be hard to use,” or “You can’t teach a pig to sing — and trying to just annoys the pig” (about users’ inability to learn to use an unusable website). But my experience is that a majority of the people who criticize my work are not just right – they are also acting in the best interest of all of us. Usability professionals make mistakes – and they are not always good at iterating: listening openly to feedback from others, learning from their mistakes, and applying their own methods to themselves in order to improve their work practices.

This book, It’s Our Research, fills a gap on my bookshelf. Other books have assumed that once you’ve carried out a usability activity, the results will sell themselves. Tomer Sharon has done a great job of compiling useful wisdom on how to make usability useful and usable. He has interviewed a large number of knowledgeable people and combined his findings with his own great insight.

The contents of this book can be summarized in seven words: do as you preach and be humble. If that’s not sufficiently usable for you, and you want more details, read on!

Rolf Molich