Usability Consultants: Discussion

On Wednesday we discussed the pros and cons of enagaging external usability professionals, rather than just doing usability testing/assessment ourselves.

Why Engage Usability Professionals?
There are many reasons to hire usability consultants to help out with projects. For one thing, they're set up to get the right users for testing, which is a great help. You may have specific issues you want to test with users, such as a new taxonomoy, the introduction of advertising, or the placement of elements on your page. But one of the biggest reasons that came up in our discussion was the fact that a consultant legitimises things in the eyes of management. We could say the same things as a consultant and have them dismissed - because of internal politics, perhaps, or because of a lack of understanding of or trust in what we do. A report from a consultant is free of associations with internal politics, and it carries the weight of inherent financial value. Sound cynical? Maybe it is, but there was certainly feeling in the group that sometimes we hire usability consultants to tell us what we already know.

Are we science?
We also spoke briefly about methodology and the non-scientific nature of usability work. Should we use two different consultants to get more through results? If there's no right answer, how much does the methodology influence the outcome? (There's an interesting discussion on this in Jared Spool's Spoolcast # 2.)

Not only is this not a science, but the goal posts are moving all the time. As technology and attitudes to technology change, we must continue to test, because what was true for yesterday's users probably isn't true of today's. One example: Not that many years ago, people were very suspicious of a site that asked them to log in - they didn't want to give any of their personal information to the Internet. Now, people have more trust in the technology, and logging in (even using credit cards) doesn't bother them. So our test results and our assumptions need to be constantly questioned and updated. Lucky we like a challenge.