Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, Second Edition

Appendix A. Afterword

When the first edition of this book was published, we expected that automated usability evaluations would be built directly into software products. These evaluations would provide feedback about customer usage, preferences, and difficulties, gathered more quickly and on a much larger scale than ever before. This hasn't happened the way Jeff envisioned it, but analytics and automated usability testing of web sites and web applications come close.

The first edition also predicted a "continued demise of manual programming skill as a prerequisite for designing software interfaces." While many prototyping tools have made the development of mocked-up interfaces quick and simple, and it is possible that comprehensive programming skills are now unnecessary, delivery methods and outputs have changed greatly, so new programming languages and tools have been invented. The idea that the writing of program code would be completely automated, with developers needing only to specify desired design parameters and the computer automatically writing the code to implement the design, has come to pass for some platforms and applications but not for others.

However, over the last decade and a half, usability and communication skills have become requirements for developing interfaces along with technical skills for all of the roles on any given product team. The importance of cross-discipline cooperation on interdisciplinary teams is greater than ever.

Now we can expect to see usability ...