Hold the front page - Usability wars break out
It's not just the US making war-like moves - usability wars have now broken out in London, it seems.

"My usability study is better than yours", screams The Register, the source of all scurrilous IT rumour. It appears that The Usability Company, a usability firm, has taken objection to a report - already referred to in this blog a week or two ago - from Interactive Bureau. The firm's report judged each FTSE-100 website hompage based on "design, usability, innovation and technical proficiency," according to The Guardian.

While it's never particularly good for professional wars to break out in public - it generates public confusion and uncertainty - there are significant moves afoot from the advertising, marketing and graphic design fraternities to take over the mantle of 'usability' or 'user experience' without really knowing what it is, a development that can do little good for the profession. [Although the fact that the profession has still to make up its mind what to call itself probably doesn't contribute much to public understanding either.]

Last year, I heard one designer refer to usability as being about running focus groups. I think he was getting it mixed up with marketing. Now Interactive Bureau, an agency that seems to work primarily in web design, branding and related activities, appears to suggest - I don't have access to their report unfortunately, so can only go by their press release and the report in The Guardian business pages - it's about whether a home page has particular functions or not. The Interactive Bureau research did not involve user testing, and was carried out by a firm I wouldn't put at the top of the list to do UX research (and whose staff I have not spotted at professional UX events). In fact as far as I'm aware Interactive Bureau does not in fact sell itself as a usability company.

While I'm sure there are some PR motives on both sides of this story, my own conclusion is that whatever the quality or otherwise of the Interactive Bureau report, the firm is merely filling a vacuum that the usability community itself has allowed to exist.

If UX people don't generate their own stories, it's hard to object when others come up with some column inches. We can object on professional grounds, but somehow it always makes the profession look like it's washing its dirty linen in public, a view reinforced by current discussions of the affair on various IA and UX lists.

Promoting the activities of our own professional bodies and running our own professional surveys and so on has to be the way forward. After all, which journalist takes a story from a little-known doctor on Harley Street when he or she can phone up the Royal College of Physicians for an expert assessment?