1. The Case for Frameworks

In 1998, usability expert Rolf Molich gave nine teams three weeks each to evaluate the webmail application www.hotmail.com. The experiment was part of a series of what he called Comparative Usability Evaluations (CUEs), which he began in an effort to identify a set of standards and best practices for usability tests. In each test, Rolf asked a variety of usability teams to evaluate a single design using the method of their choosing.

From the teams’ documented results of one such test—called CUE-2, as it was the second test in the series—an astonishing trend appeared.

Despite claims that usability professionals operate in a scientific fashion to determine the problems within an interface, usability evaluations are, ...

Get Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.