Boxes and Arrows currently has an interesting article up about how Usability.gov came into being. It turns out that the site (that I’ve mentioned before) originated in the redesign of CancerNET (now Cancer.gov); the designers collected everything that they could find which offered real data on usability, and conducted a great deal of testing on their own, in order to base the site’s new look on more than just their own feelings of what should go where. They then collected all that evidence into one place, Usability.gov. It’s now one of the only places that webdesigners and information architects can find actual evidence-based guidelines on design, and probably should be on every web designer’s bookmark page.