Gutshot

In usability, you are not supposed to have pride of ownership. You make something, you show it to the user and the user shows you what you really should have built.

In forward thinking companies, you are allowed to build what the user asks for – or at least a reasonable accommodation between the needs of the business and what the user asks for.

The overall principle is that usability will prevent the company from building the wrong thing.

For the past two years, I have been working to design something that is now out in the hands of end users. It has undergone limited, formative tests which identified a number of issues, but the actual build was never tested in any real environment.

Pity.

When rolled out to the user base, the hue and cry was loud enough to bring the deploy to a screeching halt. Improvements were shoved in and a number of enhancements were added – but there was an overall issue with screen design that will not be solved with out a complete unmaking of the current design.

Understandably, the clients are unhappy.

In the ideal word, the build would be tested in a full environment to diagnose user issues with the current design. In full blown usability, time would be taken to determine what is going wrong and where.

There is no time.

The determination was to be made by an email survey, and the early returns are in. The users have spoken: make it like the old system.

This is, of course impossible, for a number of technical and business reasons – but people want what they want.

The net result of all of this is that the existing design will be chucked in favor of a cobbled together replica of the current system's interface.

Being in usability, I should be happy that the users are getting what they've asked for. But it's hard to be happy when essentially, we've failed at our primary function:

We have built the wrong thing.