I just saw this announcement that STC has awarded a grant of $138,000 to Rennselaer PolyTech to study the usability of “tech mediated communications” – that is, web sites and wikis and elearning. The plan is to develop some sort of standard for measuring the usability of these types of communications. There are certainly lots of people talking about usability of web sites now, but this study will create a standard that incorporates more types of communication than straight web sites, and will also develop the metrics that can be used by anyone for evaluation.

The only bad news (for me, anyway) is that their results aren’t going to be available until sometime in 2009. It looks like a project that will produce something that we can all use!