There are many usability evaluation techniques that have been developed over the history of software development. But it seems to me that they are rarely used in practice.
Why aren't usability evaluation tools and methods actually used much?
Or are they used more than I've been led to believe?
They are rare, HCI is a specialist area in IT. I know next to nothing about it, but a friend of mine was a HCI engineer and she could recite reams of data about the topic, show websites, groups, academic papers, etc.
HCI is still an area that (undeservedly) gets little attention, probably because its seen as less important to the business of selling software - shrinkwrapped software is sold on marketing claims, not actual usability of it, so there is little incentive for the people who pay for the software development to pay for HCI too.
If you want to learn more (and its good you should encourage its use - I've used too many crappy interfaces, and though I try to develop better I often don't get the chance to really improve things for my users), try this website/book.
The problem mainly stems from the fact that most companies that makes software never stops and ask "How could I make this user interface easier to use?", but instead most often just asks "Is the user able to do XYZ with the interface?".
Often, the company will just ask "If the user knows everything we do, can the user do XYZ with this inteface?" which is even worse.
This may be a bit of a tangent, but two of the best sources of good usability advice I know of are Steve Krug and Kathy Sierra.
Sadly Kathy doesn't blog any longer, but you can see years of observations in the archive of her blog, "Creating Passionate Users".
Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think" may be one of the best usability bibles ever (and he spends a fair amount of time discussing usability testing tools and strategies).
Usability analysis (in particular user testing) has a significant up-front cost, both time and money. It also typically unveils a whole batch of things to fix that people would rather ignore...
Often usability methods are not applied because people making buying decisions will not pay for usability.
One area where I have personal experience is conference-management software (things like CyberChair, START, and a million others). These things must be fairly easy to write, because there are so many of them, but I swear most of the people who write them have never observed a referee or a program chair at work. And to return to the question of why, in this case program chairs and committee members are highly distributed in space---it would be very difficult for a developer to find one and watch him or her at work. Simulating the workflow requires a large setup cost, and in any one town there area probably very few individuals who are qualified to be subjects in a usability study, and their time is valuable. And there is not enough profit to justify usability. SIGPLAN, my professional society, recently contracted to use inferior software for its conferences because the inferior product was perceived to be ten times cheaper than a highly regarded competitor. The time of the volunteers who use the product was, as always, valued at zero.
Another war story and I'll shut up: when I worked for the phone companies one developer group actually had a usability specialist. But he was the only one allowed to interact with customers. I think in a lot of shops management is afraid to let developers and customers interact directly. This attitude makes it hard to apply usability methods.
People whose bottom line depends on usability do the studies. eBay is a good case in point. I was a subject for them once for an incredibly exhausting 90 minutes, just trying to sell some books. They sent 2 trained engineers with video equipment to my home, and these guys were incredibly professional. They did not bail me out when I became frustrated, and not until the study was over did they tell me that the reason I had such a bad experience was because I had tripped a bug in their software. Oh, and they paid me $200 for 90 minutes of my time. eBay obviously believes that making it easy to sell on their site makes them more profitable, and they are willing to spend real money to find out where real users get into trouble.
It's a fallacy that Usability testing (or User Research as some of us know it) has to involve significant up-front costs. Sure, if you do it 'formally' and go to town with both the testing and the follow-up analysis, it can cost significant amounts. But that cost would be far smaller than if the development had continued down an incorrect path and had to be re-worked later.
As with many techniques, there are plenty of approaches that will get you good, relevant and fast information from user research, at a lower cost. You will get key issue comments even if you only interview a handful of people. Rather than formal analysis, you can workshop the outputs very quickly with all stakeholders in the same meeting, especially if your research is focused on specific goals. You can get good feedback by interviewing the larger product team (technical writers, sales, trainers etc) rather than the users themselves.
And even if the issues found are not fixed, at least they are out in the open.
"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."
Usability evaluation tools and methods are used all the time... but more in some niches than others. I've been a User Experience (UX) specialist for my whole career - from where I'm standing, not using these tools and methods is more unusual.
Ecommerce sites have widely adopted usability & UX research. Why? Because there's a very direct link between usability and revenue generation.
Other industries are not so lucky because the link is not so immediate. When there is a gap between the purchaser and the user, there is little motivation to spend money on User-Centered Design (UCD). Enterprise software, for example, is mainly sold on the basis of feature lists to people who don’t actually have to use the software on a daily basis. Usability can therefore be pretty shocking in these apps. Of course there is a perfectly good argument for building great usability into enterprise software (reduced training costs, improved task completion times, staff morale, etc), but since it doesn't make or break the sale, usability somehow slips by the wayside. (This will change in the future but for now the usability arms race has not quite begun in this niche).
Of course, all it will take is one enterprise provider to start making products with outstanding usability, and the competitive landscape will shift. Being the first takes guts and money. It’s all about behavioural economics.
Anyway, it sounds like you happen to work in a niche that doesn't focus on UX. You should see it as an opportunity.
By the way, those of you who say that UX research needn't be expensive - this is a popular argument, but in my opinion, it isn't a good one. Whether you outsource one round of usability testing of 10 users for £10,000 (yes, that’s how much it costs, really), or whether you do it internally for next to nothing, the project timescales have to stretch out to accommodate this. After testing, requirement specs are thrown into question, then you have to make decisions and implement changes. If the changes are big, you will have to test again. It’s inevitably time-consuming and this in itself is expensive. A better argument for getting your organization to focus on UX is the price of not doing research. This can be catastrophic. Most organizations have had a train wreck or two where poor usability has been discovered post-launch and scuppered an otherwise good project. Find your train wrecks and hammer the point home.