Userless Usability

I heard of a hilarious usability joke in Portland. No users? No problem.Text stolen from DJCline.com.

From my viewpoint, if your product requires documentation you did not design your product properly. Creating usable documentation for unusable products is a futile exercise. If users need help, your usability consultants need help out the door.

The role of many technical communicators is similar to FAA forensic experts who put together detailed reports on why a plane (product) crashed. You can go through your product’s online help and tell exactly where a competitor can kill your company. They will fix a problem while you write about it.

And yet there are “consultants” who count their days until retirement conjuring up usability slideshows (sideshows?) justifying their existence. Sometimes they cook up customer surveys and dart gun the poor suckers at trade shows. Other times they bury spyware into their websites to track customers like endangered moose.

But the latest gag takes the cake. Somebody in Portland recently claimed that:

“Usability testing does not have to take place in a usability lab, and it does not have to use actual end users.”

Too darn funny!

That’s right. No more users. Userless usability is here. No more surveys or malware. That usability consultant burning a hole in your company’s payroll doesn’t even have to come in to the office anymore.

Perhaps by “actual” users they mean to create “virtual” users like in Second Life or World of Warcraft. Just make them up and tell your boss you had a bazillion users test the product. Customers will never know a troll in a corset tested their CAD system.

Maybe they mean “fantasy” users like imaginary players in those fantasy baseball leagues. Of course, it might raise eyebrows if they list Joe DiMaggio as a user.

I have to admit, if they pull this off, being a usability consultant will be the most desired job at any company stupid enough to support it. It will be a job with no work except for the occasional trade show explaining results from users that don’t exist.

In a way this joke in Portland is an insult to all the usability consultants who struggle to find out how to help users.

Know what your customers want. Make sure they get it. Repeat.

Copyright 2008 DJ Cline All rights reserved.

Posted by dj in Blumbers, Commentary, Humor [1,255 Views]