January 26, 2005

Usability Training

John Rhodes has an interesting take on usability spending in a new B&A article:
Investing in Usability: Testing versus Training. To quote:

It might shock people to hear this from me, but when I am acting as a project manager, I’d rather have a great designer on my side than a usability specialist. Given limited time and money, I need someone who can get the job done right. Designers and developers produce tangible results, and the great ones produce incredible work. For most projects, I don’t need a usability professional if I have a great designer. Furthermore, most usability professionals can’t design or develop their way out of a wet paper bag. They are often limited because they can only do research and testing, which doesn’t mean anything until it is applied to a design. So, usability specialists are usually limited in two ways: they want to test everything and most of them can’t design worth a damn.