Why is Easy-to-Use so Hard to Do?:
“It’s reminiscent of what happened when Steve Jobs, back in 1984, introduced the Macintosh by saying that we were going to make the personal computer as easy to use as the telephone. What we’ve done instead over the past fifteen years is make the telephone harder to use—how many people do you know who can successfully transfer a call on their latest digital office telephone?”
I can make a computer sit up and beg, but I still have to ask my officemate for help everytime I need to do transfer a phone call.
But the answer the author, Michael Rogers, provides for the question in the title is dead-on: ease-of-use is elusive because we rely on gurus to define ease of use, instead of relying on the people who use the systems. Many of the gurus do conduct usability testing, but generalizing about your own users of your product from the results of their usability testing on some other product is ineffective.