Jakob Nielsen, Author & Web Site Usability Guru

“Usability has two roles: to set the direction for the design and to check that the design works. The second has gotten the most attention since it is the simplest: just run a user test of any Web site and you will quickly have a long list of things that must be changed to make the site easier to use. But it would be better if we didn’t get these problems in the first place, and that’s why usability also needs to set the direction for the design. Before any design has been done, a development project should conduct a series of user research to discover users’ needs and the types of designs that work well or that cause problems for users.” From an interview with Jakob Niesen —Jakob Nielsen, Author & Web Site Usability GuruPublish)