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Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time)

2008· article· en· 595 citations· W2122909041 on OpenAlex· 10.1145/1357054.1357074

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian affiliationAn author listed a Canadian institution. This is the only route the usual frame has.

Full frame distilled prediction

Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

Candidate categories
none
Consensus categories
none
Domain
Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
Study design
Candidate signal: Bench or experimentalConsensus signal: none
Genre
Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score
0.594
Threshold uncertainty score
0.437
Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated · codex-gemma-dda1882f352a

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

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.

Opus teacher head0.054
GPT teacher head0.297
Teacher spread
0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

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

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Topic
Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
Field
Computer Science
Canadian institutions
University of Calgary
Funders
not available
Keywords
UsabilityComputer scienceHuman–computer interaction
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes