Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule ’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during design brainstorming, it can kill creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done prematurely during early system design, the many interface issues seen can kill what would could have been an inspired vision. If done to verify an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today's reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow's eager acceptance. Traditional usability evaluation should not be used to validate very early design stages or culturally-sensitive systems. Other reflective and critical methods should be considered in their stead. Author Keywords Usability testing, interface critiques, sketching, cultural
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.131 | 0.349 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".