Usability and Gov Gab

To be fair to Gov Gab, which I've questioned before, I found this post to be interesting, particularly the bit on the usability testing Social Security Admin did on the drug benefit. Usability testing was a cutting edge tool in IT in the late 80's but it was difficult to implement. When you're in a time crunch, usability testing is the first thing to go (then training, then instructions, etc. etc.). It takes a lot of discipline to say: do it right the first time and you'll save time (resources) over the long run. It's also true that most times usability testing didn't show a smoking gun, so it's easy to minimize its importance.