“Who needs usability engineering, anyway?” – This is a question that one might hear from people whose experiences with usability engineering services have not been too good.

With all the “advanced topics” on usability engineering floating around in the blogosphere it may sometimes be hard to find information on the fundamentals, so we are providing this primer on the involvement of end users in the development process. This is basic information, but for some readers it may also be information they always wanted to know but were afraid to ask for. After all, you have to start somewhere.