Can designers evaluate usability?

Can your designers effectively evaluate usability?  A study from 1996 addresses this issue:

Designers were more critical both about the interface aspects and pedagogical dimensions and significantly found more errors. Designers were more efficient than users when executing the usability evaluation, but could not completely replace users (some errors were found only by users). Designers were better in the double task of trying to critique a new interface and learn about the content at the same time. The variability of feedback within users and within designers was high.

Usability Feedback in Education Software Prototypes: A Contrast of Users and Experts . Ph.D. Thesis in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education, Michigan State University Pericles Varella Gomes.
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Posted at 15:30, Published in: Testing

Product Tours & Interface Convention

The Signal vs Noise blog has been humming along nicely lately with a notable discussion/link collection of product tours. Among the suggested tours, the zoom overlays on this demo stood out.  We're particularly proud of our walkthrough, featuring multiple views in a single non-scrolling page using cross browser dynamic html.

In general, this type of survey of existing presentation styles is not only useful for inspiration, it's also representative of the common user experience.  These conventions are learned by users and should be carefully considered.  The bobulate.com gallery of web search interfaces is a particularly useful example.
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Posted at 19:45, Published in: Web Usability