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I guess it would be something like this:

a) Most things are pretty hard to use; much harder than they ought to be. b) Frequent, iterative user testing (test it, tweak it, test it again) while you're designing is the best way to make things more usable. c) Usability isn't just a specialty; it's something that should be practiced by anybody who designs anything.

You don't like being labeled a "Guru" do you?

Well, actually I do like it. (Who wouldn't? It's very flattering.)

But it makes me nervous because the interest in finding a usability guru is just a reflection of a larger problem: the search for simple design "answers." The problem is, all the players on a Web design team have very strong opinions about what makes for a good design, based on their personal likes and dislikes. And as a result, when they're trying to make design decisions most Web teams end up spending a lot of time in what I call "religious debates"--endless, divisive arguments about what "most people" really like. And one of the tactics people often turn to as a way to resolve these ongoing arguments is the appeal to a higher authority: finding some published research, or hiring an outside expert, or finding a guru ("_____ _____ says nobody likes pulldown menus.") The problem is, there are very few usability questions that have that kind of simple answer.

How can the average Web site owner determine if their site is usable?

This is one question that does have a simple answer (at least I think it does): Ask a few people to use your site while you watch. Have them try to do a few of the tasks that most visitors would do (or the ones that you want visitors to do), then watch and listen carefully to see what confuses them, what they misunderstand or misinterpret, where they go astray, and what's missing that they expect to see. After watching four or five users, it should be pretty obvious what's working and what's not. (Note that this doesn't mean asking them what they like or dislike. Seeing what they do--and asking them why they did it, if it's not obvious--is what's important.)

Is usability an art or a science?

This is one of those questions that I know will come back to haunt me no matter how I answer it, because a lot of people have a vested interest in seeing it one way or the other. Personally, I think it's probably much closer to art (or perhaps "craft"), because science means doing experiments that produce rules and laws that are objectively true and universally applicable. In usability, the answer to most of the important questions turns out to be "It depends."

After all these years, I still find very little usability research that's more enlightening than the experience of watching your first twenty or thirty user tests. If someone came to me and wanted to learn usability, I'd tell them to log a lot of hours just watching people use things before they read all the literature in the field.

What's the most common mistake in Web design?

Not testing. People launch sites all the time with major flaws that could have been fixed easily if they'd only done only a few user tests early on. The problem is, when we're developing something we're all naturally hesitant to show it to anyone before it's finished--which is exactly when we should be showing it to them if we want to learn how to make it better.

Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert who causes a lot of controversy because of his strict views. What are your thoughts on him?

Very smart. Been at it forever. Single handedly brought usability to public awareness. (I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be reading this if Jakob had decided to pursue Botany instead.) He tends to overstate for effect ("Flash: 99% Bad"), but I find I agree with what he's saying 99% of the time.

Where do you see usability headed in the future? In your experience, is the Web as a whole becoming more usable?

As a whole, yes; it's much more usable, now that there's been enough time for best practices to start to emerge. There are really only a few good ways to do a checkout system for a shopping site, for instance, and most people are smart enough to look around and imitate the successful implementations instead of reinventing the wheel. (Building a better wheel is a good thing, too, of course, but only if you're talented enough to really come up with a better one.)

The future? I think usability is going to end up being something that anyone who goes into design will learn in school. One good introductory course in usability for every designer would make a huge difference in the overall quality of the things we use. As Jakob pointed out a year ago, in a few years designers should be doing much of the basic usability work themselves, leaving usability specialists like me to do things like developing usability courses, working on the large, complicated projects that call for a lot of experience, and publishing models of best practices for people to imitate.