At last night's Information Design Association presentation, David Sless talked about benchmarking research for credit card statements. This was quite interesting. Almost as interesting was that he seemed at near circumloquitous pain to avoid the word "usability". I can't help but think that this may be a problem.

At the IDA conference this year, David Farbey's excellent overview of user-focused technical communication, and Jane Teather's piece (mostly) on user testing form design seemed like news. This, too, is a problem. At UA Europe last year, Leisa Reichelt's session on doing user research, and subsequent panel appearance, were not merely news, but news that went down about as well as the death of a family pet. That is definitely a problem.

As I see it (and I'm probably not making any friends here) this problem is that there are three distinct establishments, each with their own culture, and  all doing more or less the same thing. Information Design, Technical Communications, and Usability all look like different models of the the same machine. The machine produces user-optimised information.

Sless' presentation, whilst engaging, was more or less a description of something I can see done at Red Gate a couple of times a week. He did a usability trial, quite a useful one, on documentation intelligibility. Sure, he was working with credit card statements, rather than the software UA I'm more accustomed to, but it wasn't really about the details. It was a fairly simple "small numbers of participants find most of the problems" affair with some startling results. The really interesting parts were the background on benchmarking, and its impact on iterative usability testing, and the inference of design patterns from the collective usability failings of the documents being tested. These areas weren't really addressed.

That's ok if a well delivered presentation on how (with a little bit of 'why') to run an inexpensive documentation usability test is new, exciting, and valuable. But should it really be any of those things, and would it if the three establishments actually talked to each other?

At bottom, I'm running off at the mouth about having spent a fiver being told something I already knew - it's not exactly a big deal. But I do begin to wonder how many other people in the audiences at tech comms, UX, and ID events find themselves feeling similarly.

I was asked by a colleague a while back, what I thought the essential difference was between the information design and the technical communications events we'd been to. A little flippantly, I said "hope". It's true that the info design guys seem more enthused by the possibilities of doing things, and rather more academically engaged. It also seems as though the tech comms chaps are more focused on solving practical information problems, with the corresponding sense of despondency and resignation that sometimes attends working in large organisations. These are definitely two cultures that need to be talking to each other, and since usability best practice is often news to both of them, a three-way chat starts to sound productive.

As for practical ideas, I'm not sure. Any hot tips for saving a bunch of us a fiver?