Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.

How can I say that anybody can do usability? Have I just written myself out of a job? No.
Here’s why:

• Everybody needs the outcome: As with your need to eat, your company needs to meet its business goals, which it can do much better if the design has been improved through usability.
• Anybody can perform the most basic activities: Most anyone can fry a chicken, cook potatoes, run a quick test with 5 customers, or score a design for compliance with a checklist of usability guidelines.
• Anyone can learn these basics pretty quickly: They’re not all that difficult.
• There’s a level of excellence beyond the basics: Going to a fancy restaurant and eating a meal cooked by a master chef is vastly different than eating something you throw together yourself in 20 minutes. Similarly, a usability expert will give you insights into your users’ needs and your possible design directions that are much deeper than advice you’d get from someone whose main job is in a different field.
• Skill levels form a continuum from beginner to expert; it’s not a dichotomy. Every time you learn something, your performance improves. Usability and cooking are particularly suited for continuing education, because anything you learn will remain useful for many years to come. This is why I place so much emphasis on usability training: you get better results for every extra bit you learn.

One of the discount usability movement’s basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the world, and to make this happen we need more people to take on usability assignments. Read Jakob Nielsen’s full article here.