Certification is worthless
The true measure of a usability professional is the person’s ability to apply knowledge in an interpretive manner that fits the circumstances of specific design problems, which are different every time. For example, how much to talk to the test user? Nearly everyone I have ever seen run a test talks too much and thus biases the study outcome. These professionals know the rule to stay quiet most of the time. But they invariably interpret the specific circumstances wrong when they are in live test situations. They think that asking a user a certain question is the way to move a test forward, and they don’t think about how their intervention will bias that user’s behaviour 10 minutes later.
The only way to gauge the quality of usability professionals is to work with them on projects and see whether they provide insightful and helpful advice. Managers who are skilled usability professionals in their own right can also judge others’ skills at facilitating studies by observing some test sessions and paying close attention to the details of their methodologies. I am appalled by the prevalence of user experience managers who don’t observe their staffs’ sessions and thus are unaware of the many methodology blunders that occur under the aegis of their own groups.
How do I know that methodology blunders run rampant in our industry? I know it because of the huge amount of bad methodology I discover every time I see someone new run a study:
- People with degrees from prestigious programs? Horrible studies.
- People with fancy job titles in major corporations or glamorous design firms? Howlers every few minutes of the session.
- People who have given well-received presentations about usability methodology at respected conferences? Can’t run an actual study right.
I have concluded that the potential to be a good usability professional can’t even be judged by the quality of a person’s methodology skills, because nearly everyone makes so many mistakes. The real test is whether the person improves his or her methodology after a senior usability expert has pointed out that person’s mistakes.
Luckily, many people do have the ability to learn and improve.
The problem is simply that most usability people have been raised by wolves, in terms of their actual skills. They may have graduate degrees, but they have never had that close mentoring relationship with usability veterans who helped them to hone their methodology skills by correcting their actual performance on a minute-by-minute basis.
Let me repeat:
- You can’t judge usability skills by testing a candidate’s book learning, because it doesn’t correlate with practical performance.
- You can’t even judge usability potential by testing a candidate’s practical skills, because almost invariably they will be poor.
You have to observe a person over time to decide whether he or she is a good usability professional. And that is simply infeasible to assess in any certification.
Education is worthless
One of the reasons certification is worthless in the usability field is that education is worthless. Or, to be more accurate, education is almost worthless. I say this despite having a Ph.D. in the field, and despite the fact that the last person I hired has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, which does have one of the world’s best degree programs in human-computer interaction.
A small amount of theory and principles is, in fact, essential for you to be a good usability professional. For example, you have to understand the difference between quantitative and qualitative studies and why most usability studies are better done with a tiny number of test participants, even though some require a larger sample.
After all, I write usability books and I run a usability conference, and both would be doomed ventures if people didn’t benefit from learning some background material before they venture into practical usability projects.
But you need only a small amount of book learning before you start doing practical usability projects. Spending years in the education system before venturing into practice will cause most of your book learning to be wasted.
It’s much better to learn the basics of usability and then immediately start doing real user testing for real development projects. Of course, your work won’t be as good as that of a senior usability expert, but the only way to become a senior usability expert is to do enough practical projects.
Continuing education is valuable
Instead of extensive up-front education, it’s much better to spend time learning more theory after you’ve become immersed in practical usability projects. True usability expertise comes not just from doing projects, but also from taking the time to reflect on those projects and to continuously improve your methodology skills. Continuous process improvement is not just a quality assurance idea for manufacturing. It works for an individual’s professional development as well.
The most effective way to improve is to get an experienced mentor who invests the time to give you hands-on attention. If you’re looking for a job in the field, ask how often you’ll have a senior expert sit in on your studies and other usability activities. Also ask about the budget for continuing education. Learning that happens after you’ve got experience is much more valuable than up-front learning.
Should designers and developers do usability?
At my seminars, I'm often asked whether designers and developers can perform usability activities or whether those activities should be left to dedicated usability specialists. The answer depends on your circumstances; there are several important pros and cons to having designers and developers branch out into usability.
- Con: Specialisation drives performance.
Specialised workers are more productive than people who try to do everything. The more types of activities you have to do, the less time you’ll devote to learning the intricacies of each one — and the less experience you’ll build in each one. Lack of experience is especially problematic for usability work, because the ability to correctly analyse user behaviour is extraordinarily dependent on the experience of having previously observed a wide range of behaviours.
The argument for specialisation is particularly compelling for design vs. usability because different personality types tend to excel in those two disciplines. Design obviously appeals to people with a drive to put things together, whereas usability requires analytic thinking and conceptualisation skills.
- Pro: Less staff required.
It would be great if every project team had 10 designers who were all experts in different aspects of user experience design. And it would be great to have a bunch of usability professionals support their design by working on multiple forms of user research and other usability activities.
At many companies, the user experience teams are too small to justify a dedicated usability professional. Indeed, many project ‘teams’ consist of a single person. Luckily, usability basics are easy enough to learn: We take team members through a simple user test of their design in a three-day workshop.
Not having usability people is no reason not to have usability. Your team members will benefit from doing some of the simpler usability activities themselves. Discount user testing can be done with minimal resources.
- Con: Lack of objectivity.
If you test your own design, however, you might be less willing to admit its deficiencies. Designers can be too willing to dismiss user complaints or problems as minor or unrepresentative, when in fact the test results indicate the need for a deep redesign. Also, designers can get so caught up in their own theories about how users ought to behave that they forget to test for cases in which people behave differently.
One of the key things we teach in our user-testing courses is how to write good test tasks, because most novice test facilitators use the wrong tasks and get poor data as a result. Designers are susceptible to employing tasks that focus almost exclusively on their own pet features, rather than on goals that users really want to accomplish.
Of course, if you know you might lack objectivity, you can proactively work to overcome this deficiency. For example, you can force yourself to include test tasks that go beyond the things you personally care about.
Designers can also increase their testing objectivity by asking colleagues to review their test plans or to listen in on a session or two.
- Pro: Higher credibility, easier communication.
When the same person does both design and usability, you don’t have to worry about the designer dismissing the usability person’s findings. People tend to believe in their own work!
When different people focus on different project aspects, they have to communicate, which takes time in meetings and time for report writing. In contrast, when a designer runs a test, he or she knows what happened and can immediately start redesigning to fix the problems that the test identified. No meeting, no report, no communication overhead required, as long as the information is lodged in a single brain.
The downside to the lack of meetings and reports is that the usability findings don’t get refined and discussed, which, again, leads to fewer deep insights and major user-interface reconceptualisations. Even though usability reports qualify as overhead, they’re also a good way to build institutional memory that will benefit new designers and future projects.
Any test is better than no test
If you can afford it, it’s better to have dedicated usability specialists perform your project’s usability activities. But, the choice is not between implementing this ideal and doing nothing. For many projects, there’s a middle road: Let the designers or the developers take on some usability work. This is much better than having no usability effort at all.
About the author
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the “discount usability engineering" movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Nielsen, noted as "the world's leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report and the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering, Usability Inspection Methods, International User Interfaces, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, and Prioritizing Web Usability. Nielsen’s Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers. From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.
