Gosh, this week has just flow by, and at the same time it feels like about a million years since the holidays ended. We’re quite blessed to have a fast start in the New Year. Happy 2010!

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Our first item is best summed up with it’s executive summary:

Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.

Anybody Can Do Usability – Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

I’ll be the first to say that what we do here at Normal Modes isn’t rocket science. Just about anything you do takes a training, experience, and perspective (e.g. think like a website.) (Maybe I should trademark that.) Making usable websites isn’t some special innate gift. It’s just about getting appropriate training, mastering the craft (generally through years of experience), and developing the humility to let user feedback trump other agendas.  It helps immeasurably to like what you do.

What I’m not so sure I subscribe to is the notion that the usability and ux field is so robust that there are the levels of hierarchy NNG likes to believe.  True, they do some fabulous work and they’ve been instrumental in the usability movement. True, there are some people who call themselves “usability experts” or “user experience experts,” but have no actual usability or ux experience and who dilute the meaning. (In these latter cases, I find, they’re adopting the moniker as 1:1 replacement for “web designer” – which is decidedly not the case. Web designer does  not equal user experience/usability expert.)

But the idea that there’s expertise in scale (e.g. “a second-tier usability firm or even a third-tier local consultant instead of bringing in a world-class usability firm”) is somewhat elitist and – perhaps most troubling – inaccurate. In my experience that means you’re paying for the name behind the study (which none of your customers is ever going to see) and that company’s kool-aid. I’ve worked with NNG as well as other companies (before Normal Modes) – they have a particular ideology they subscribe to and that ideology, brand, and independent status is what companies pay for when they hire NNG. It’s not that their reports are so much more insightful or thorough or valuable than any other well written, thoughtful report. To reap the most value from from a usability study choose the right type of well-run study (eye tracking, hueristic evaluation, ethnographic research) with appropriately selected users.

Establishing a hierarchy may be good for the NNG brand, but it’s not good for the craft. Most of that post is a backhanded “helpfulness” and “sharing in the wealth” for other usability firms. That’s disappointing – if not surprising – from NNG.  There’s plenty to go around, guys.

And wasn’t the thesis of “Ratatouille” that anyone can cook – without all kinds of fancy degrees and titles and training?

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On a lighter note, FUI Fantasy User Interfaces from the movies.  Awesome.

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Considering company-wide design guidelines?  Paul Sherman’s wrote a thought response to an inquiry at IXDA forum of guideline considerations.