What is it about?
From Cockton (2012) Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, Chapter 15 "Usability Evaluation": "usability methods are too incompletely specified to be consistently applied, letting Wayne Gray and Marilyn Salzman invalidate several key studies in their Damaged Merchandise paper of 1998. Commentaries on their paper failed to undo the damage of the Damaged Merchandise charge, with further papers in the first decade of this century adding more concerns over not only method comparison, but the validity of usability methods themselves. "
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Why is it important?
[Also quoting Cockton] "Critical analyses by Gray and Salzman, and by Hertzum and Jacobsen, made pragmatic research on usability even less attractive for leading HCI journals and conferences. The method focus of usability research shrunk, with critiques exposing not only the consequences of ambivalence over the causes of poor usability (system, user or both?), but also the lack of agreement over what was covered by the term usability."
Perspectives
The initial reaction to this paper was extremely hostile. In retrospect that is NOT surprising as those who initially responded were, for the most part, the high profile "stars" of the CHI community whose work we had reviewed and found wanting. I take the review by Gilbert Cockton +14 years later as being close to the "judgment of history". I also take the sort of work being done now by Gilbert and many other CHI Researchers as exemplars of the types of research that the field should have been doing in lieu of the misguided attempts to validate the largely underspecified UEMs.
Professor Wayne D. Gray
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Damaged Merchandise? A Review of Experiments That Compare Usability Evaluation Methods, Human-Computer Interaction, September 1998, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1207/s15327051hci1303_2.
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