Two longstanding members of the CHI community calling attention to the dangers of overuse of usability evaluation. The general trend is that papers without quantitative usability evaluation have all but disappeared from conferences, and as a result researchers gear their investigations toward what can be quantitatively evaluated using widely accepted techniques. Lack of innovation, irrelevance and dogs and cats living together ensue. If you ask me, you can replace usability evaluation with “the form of quantitative evaluation preferred by CS community X” and CHI with “conference X” and you have an equally valid criticism. Give a man a hammer…