How does one test the usability of the magnificient UI you've just created?
I presume that most times, the UI is created with the developers personal tastes in mind and then during a beta cycle, feedback from a few testers may finetune it a bit. Then, when the real users get to it, they may or may not be able to figure out how to use it.
What would be fantastic, though, if we could watch people using the software to see how they actually use it (or how they actually can't use it...).
Jon Udell briefly discusses this same thing is his blog (link removed, no longer works), and points to TechSmith's Morae and UsersFirst's VisualMark (still in beta) as two software packages which “use live video and screen video, in combination, to observe and analyze how people really use (or fail to use) software”