Evaluating usability methods

Practitioners who deal in the business world must find ways to keep up-to-date with best practices in the field and must apply them to their work in cost-effective ways. Research should help to define best practices, but often the worlds of research and of practice can seem too dichotomous. Recently, for instance, the fields of usability and user-centered design generally have seen considerable controversy about the relative effectiveness of different methodologies. In this column, Dennis Wixon argues that we need to look at whether we are evaluating methods by the appropriate criteria. He considers the growing body of literature on evaluation of methods unhelpful, or even irrelevant, to the practitioner. He argues that consideration of the factors that determine success of usability efforts in product development organizations will fundamentally change the terms of the debate. ---David A. Siegel