History of Usability Testing
Henry Dreyfuss in the late 1940s contracted to design the state rooms for the twin ocean liners "Independence" and "Constitution." He built eight prototype staterooms and installed them in a warehouse. He then brought in a series of travelers to "live" in the rooms for a short time, bringing with them all items they would normally take when cruising. His people were able to discover over time, for example, if there was space for large steamer trunks, if light switches needed to be added beside the beds to prevent injury, etc., before hundreds of state rooms had been built into the ship.
A Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) employee wrote that PARC used extensive usability testing in creating the Xerox Star, introduced in 1981.
The Inside Intuit book, says (page 22, 1984), "... in the first instance of the Usability Testing that later became standard industry practice, LeFevre recruited people off the streets... and timed their Kwik-Chek (Quicken) usage with a stopwatch. After every test... programmers worked to improve the program.") Scott Cook, Intuit co-founder, said, "... we did usability testing in 1984, five years before anyone else... there's a very big difference between doing it and having marketing people doing it as part of their... design... a very big difference between doing it and having it be the core of what engineers focus on.
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“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 10:13.