The purpose of CUE-7 was to compare recommendations for given usability problems.
Nine professional teams simultaneously and independently suggested recommendations for fixing six nontrivial usability problems. Three problems originated from CUE-5 (IKEA PAX Wardrobe Planner). The remaining three problems originated from CUE-6 (www.Enterprise.com).
The CUE-7 results were presented and discussed at a panel session entitled “Recommendations on Recommendations” at the CHI 2007 conference in San Jose, CA, USA, in May 2007.
We often complain that developers don’t listen to us.
Enough complaining!
Let’s make our advice more usable and useful to them.
— Jeff Johnson —
Practitioner’s Take Away
- Be aware of business and technical constraints.
If business values are irrelevant to usability assessments, it isn’t hard to also conclude that usability is irrelevant to business. - Spell out your recommendation in detail to avoid misunderstanding and “creative misinterpretation.”
- Recommend the least possible change. Tweaking the existing thing is always preferable to starting over. Major changes require major effort, including retesting a lot of “stuff.”
Papers about CUE-7
Recommendations on Recommendations,
by Rolf Molich, Kasper Hornbæk, Steven Krug, Josephine Scott and Jeff Johnson
User Experience Magazine, Vol. 7, Issue 4, 2008.