UPA Thumbnail on Rolf Molich
January 2nd, 2007
Over at the Usability Professionals Association site, Cliff Anderson (who nicknamed me “Usability’s Bad Boy”) wrote a wonderful piece about my hero and many-time User Interface Conference presenter, Rolf Molich:
“Lots of people were talking about how wonderful usability studies were” Rolf points out. “I tended to agree with them because I had seen myself the enormous political impact a usability study can have. But then I was curious and said, ‘Are they reproducible?’”
He shared his thoughts on a usability list serv, got four volunteers, then launched CUE-1. This study looked at a Windows application, having the participants test it in any way they saw fit to try and identify usability problems.
The results were presented at UPA 1998. Though “everyone in the crowd thought it was interesting,” there was also some resistance, something that Rolf would become used to over the years. He notes, “People said, ‘This just can’t be true. The results just can’t be this diverse.”
…
Undoubtedly, the most important finding of the CUE studies has been the diversity of the results. In explanation, Rolf points to the simple number of usability problems in the average system: “If you have 500 problems to choose from on a non-trivial website, and the usability test basically finds 40 problems more or less at random, then it’s no longer a surprise when you get these different problems.”
What’s the solution? Interestingly, Rolf doesn’t see it as increasing the number of users, or other methodological changes. “The solution is a much more radical one,” he states firmly. “It’s prevention. Many of the usability problems we have seen should have not occurred on the website in the first place.”
