People: the well-tempered practitioner

XIV.5 September + October 2007
Page: 46
Digital Citation

The problem with usability problems


Authors:
Chauncey Wilson

A major goal for usability practitioners is to discover and eliminate usability problems from a product or service (without introducing new problems) within budget, time, and quality constraints. Making products more usable is laudable, but as a field, we have many rancorous debates about the definition of "usability problem." I've been in meetings where tempers have flared over different views on what constitutes a usability problem. Why do we argue so much about something as fundamental as a definition? Many of the debates are the result of the contextual nature of usability—usability is not simply an absolute property of…




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