Usability Design Considered Harmful

This paper is titled Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time) and is written by Saul Greenburg of the University of Calgary and Bill Buxton from Microsoft Research. Their paper reflects on the recent upsurge of usability evaluations in CHI papers at every level of development. They repeatedly state that they do appreciate the benefits of usability evaluations at the end of a research project, but early in the creation process they adamantly oppose them. The CHI field is full of new, strange, and novel ways to interact with computers, and this paper suggests that evaluating these young technologies against long-developed, traditional methods of interaction may prove that the new technique is inferior to the traditional one, even though the new technique is just not fully developed.
I agree with the statements of the paper and have read several research papers were usability evaluations seemed to be tagged on as an afternote to appeal to the conference committees. Usability evaluations should be considered as a possibility depending on the nature of the research project and not a necessity.