| <- Usability Must Die |  |
| The Day Alertbox Died |
I have been reading Alertbox since 1995 and can honestly say that it kindled a desire to produce software that excites, empowers and delights people who use it.
I have passed links onto dozens of people and deposited hard copies of articles on the desks of people who are too busy to waste time 'surfing the net'. But all that has stopped in the last couple of years.
I have felt that Alertbox was getting boring, and puff pieces for the Nielsen Norman Group seemed to predominate.
Rather than trust my gut feeling, I decided to do some analysis on the Alertbox articles, sidebars, and readers comments from 1995 until today (the detailed statistics will be updated every time a new Alertbox Article is published.
What I found seemed to confirm my fears.
So what?
Well, it's fine that Jakob and Co use Alertbox to sell their reports, but it highlights the premise that Usability has had its day, and we should be ensuring that User Centred Design takes centre stage in the development process, instead of trying to reinvent Usability as Interaction Design. We should be teaching programmers about users, rather than creating a new caste of high priests.
Alertbox has become inward looking and stale. (See a site that still delivers the goods.)
Have a look at the analysis I have done, and let me know what you think !
See also: Alertbox Analysis