Do We Practise What We Preach in Formulating Our Design and Development Methods?

It is important, for our credibility as user interface designers and educators, that we practice what we preach. Many system designers and programmers remain sceptical about the need for user-centred design. To win them over, we need to be absolutely clear about what they need to do. We, as a community, propose many different methods to support naive designers so that they will design and implement user-centred systems. One of the most popular methods is HCI design patterns --- captured and formulated by experts for the sole purpose of transferring knowledge to novices. In this paper we investigate the usability of these patterns, using both theoretical and experimental analysis, and conclude that they are not usable. Hence, unfortunately, we have to conclude that we don't practice what we preach. We conclude the paper by making some suggestions about how we can address this situation.

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