Cost-Justifying Usability, 2nd Edition

negative, numerous diplomatic engagements were required to explain to

the angry stakeholders the discrepancy between the first e-mail message

and the formal report.

✦ And finally, a process for examining patterns that emerge across usability

studies. In environments in which many products are being tested, the use

of a database or visualization method for uncovering meta-problems—prob-

lems that occur repeatedly across products—can reveal general problems

that are more serious than any single study might indicate. For example, if

you run 20 studies in a year and find that in each study, several participants

encountered a similar medium-severity problem, ...