The most recent arlertbox from Mr Nielsen tells us that 33% of the usability practitioners surveyed don't keep any of their old usability reports. This tells us something about the value that is placed on these reports.
Almost 40% keep theirs in an organised repository, whilst the remainder keep theirs somewhere around the place (in a box under the stairs perhaps).
But Jakob doesn't mention one of the most useful types of usability reports option: "The Public Archive".
Sauli Laitinen has published "Better Games Through Usability Evaluation and Testing" at Gamasutra where he talks about the importance of usability for game design and gives specific examples of usability problems found during an expert review of a game.
There are dozens of game design post-mortems available on the site where designers talk about lessons learnt from different games. This level of honesty is hard to find in other industries where usability is just as important.
Donald Norman publishes a page "In Praise of Good Design", where he ""illustrates products that have some special positive characteristic worthy of comment". Don is looking for more examples, so please send suggestions to products @ jnd.org.
We encourage to talk about their usability experiences at our South West Usability Group meetings, but people can be afraid to talk about their failures which makes it diificult to explain how they produced successful designs as we learn an awful lot from our failures. (Anyone who would like to come and talk at SWUG is more than welcome).
Unless we are able to be more open about our usability experiences we are implying that it is shameful to make silly mistakes in our designs, whilst in fact I am proud of the fact that I make mistakes but then learn from them and do my best not to make them again.
Perhaps it's time to start publishing our internal usability reports on the internet. Anyone interested?
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