When I was 15 or so I bought an album by the band Cargo Cult on the recommendation of a friend. I didn’t know what the band name meant, and since this was assuredly pre-Google, I had to go to the library to find out that cargo cults were the result of contact between indigenous tribes and technologically advanced cultures.
In an article about the John Frum Cargo Cult in Smithsonian Magazine, anthropologist Kirk Huffman explains:
“You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.
Interesting. But what do cargo cults have to do with usability testing?
David Travis, of London-based usability consulting firm UserFocus, brilliantly connects cargo cults and usability testing in his UXBooth article about losing sight of the basic fundamentals of usability testing:
The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote about cargo cult science, where researchers adopt the paraphernalia of doing scientific activity but forget its core principles of empiricism, integrity and avoidance of bias. In the same way, people sometimes adopt the paraphernalia of usability testing, such as the one-way mirror and the video cameras, but forget the core principles of doing user research. Get those core principles right and you can run a great usability test with just a pencil and paper.
Given that most of my UX knowledge is theoretical, this article made it clear that I have to be diligent to not simply “adopt the paraphernalia of usability testing” without having a firm understanding of the basic fundamentals of user research.
Links:
- 4 Forgotten Principles of Usability Testing. by David Travis , PhD
- ‘In John They Trust‘, (Smithsonian, Feb 2006). by Paul Raffaele
- Richard Feynman’s ‘Cargo Cult Science’ lecture on Wikipedia.
- Cargo Cult entry on Wikipedia.