Can collaboration help redefine usability

Sonia is a product manager interested in improving usability and customer experiences. She is familiar with many of the techniques of market research such as surveys and focus groups but wants to understand how the usability approach differs. Robert is a usability researcher. He wants to identify research projects that reflect issues facing practitioners and facilitate the transfer of research findings into practice. Linda is a highly-skilled usability practitioner with over 20 years of front-line experience. She has a wealth of techniques and useful knowledge to share but no easy way to do it. Carl is new to the field. He is hoping to jumpstart his career by learning as much as possible but has a hard time identifying what information is most important. Imagine if these individuals could go to a web site that served as a single point of entry to a rich, ever-evolving knowledge base reflecting the current state of the field. This knowledge base would incorporate both formal and tacit knowledge. It would integrate empirical findings with practical techniques. It would include theory and opinion. All the information would be organized for easy retrieval, appropriately tagged and presented so that the reader could easily distinguish between generally accepted ideas and more speculative ones. Readers could add comments in a way that preserved the integrity and usability of the information. Editors would monitor and summarize these comments so that they did not clutter up the articles and would aggregate and link them so that ideas from diverse sources were easily accessible. Over time, these comments from readers could inspire research, serve as the foundations for documenting best practices and help refine the organization of the knowledge base. Today, pieces of such a knowledge base exist. There is a small but interesting HCI/usability section of Wikipedia (Wikipedia Contributors, 2006b). The Usability Professionals Association has recently launched its Body of Knowledge (BoK) projec