Usability testing is really design research 6 Jun 2007

Iain Barker says that usability testing is really design research:

"If I could do a bit of time travel I'd go back and change the term 'usability testing'. Although the title is quite descriptive, it is ultimately too close to 'user acceptance testing'. And the use of the testing word is definitely a problem.

"The problem is that people associate testing (and in particular user acceptance testing) with something you do at the end of something. You test it to make sure it works...

"...Sure you can conduct a usability test at the end of a process on a finished product, but as any good usability practitioner will tell you, saving your usability testing until the end of a project when it is more costly and time-consuming to make changes doesn't really make any sense...

"...I [therefore] encourage you to think of usability testing as design research - and maybe you could also call it design research from now on so that our less well-informed colleagues don't get confused."

Interesting stuff. Calling it "design research" might make user testing more palatable to designers too?