{"id":460,"date":"2014-02-19T07:24:34","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T07:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.agconsult.com\/en\/experts-dont-know-everything-not-even-usability-experts\/"},"modified":"2024-07-25T16:52:36","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T14:52:36","slug":"experts-dont-know-everything-not-even-usability-experts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.agconsult.com\/en\/usability-blog\/experts-dont-know-everything-not-even-usability-experts\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts don’t know everything, not even usability experts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Do experts know everything?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

20 years ago I thought so. More specifically: I thought I<\/strong> knew everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely my usability expertise, my deep knowledge of information architecture would be enough to find and solve all the usability issues on every possible website?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without research you can never truly know your users<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

20 years of user research have made me a bit more humble Okay, a lot more humble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expert knowledge alone is not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does that mean I’m not a good usability expert? Hell no. I think I know more about web usability and information architecture than anyone else in Belgium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Non-Belgian readers, please suppress that giggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, that’s a lie: Els<\/a> knows more about it than I do. See, I told you I was modest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And still, despite all of our combined expertise, we often say things like \u2018That depends\u2019, \u2018We’ll have to ask your customers’ or ‘We’ll have to test that’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Usability rules are not stone tablets<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A lot of web designers and programmers resent those answers. They like it when everything is fixed. That makes it nice and easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Admittedly, Jakob Nielsen’s rules, the interface pattern libraries you see all around and even the usability tips we write on this blog, sometimes suggest it’s all black and white, clear-cut. Wake up call: it isn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Usability isn’t that thing you read about in books. To fully understand usability, you have to see real users in action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are lots of rules and often those rules are right. But sometimes they’re also flexible, open for interpretation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite often the things that we as experts thought might cause problems end up not troubling users at all. While the things we thought wouldn’t be too much of a problem cause half of the test users to trip up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Content and structure are determined by your visitors<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to your site’s information structure and your content, the rules don’t really help you much. They get more than a little vague. A few examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n