Jakob Nielsen on Offshore Usability: “To save costs, some companies are outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited access — if any — to good usability data from the target users.”

Offshore usability is a specific case of the general “offshore design” problem. Put simply, software teams are not successful when design or management are done in a different physical location than programming. Once I actually had a job where I was in New York, my direct manager was in Singapore, his manager was in Hyderabad, and if I needed any management input I had literally no choice but to go to the CEO because at least he was awake during the same hours as I was. You can’t get things done like this. A good project team relies on hundreds of small interactions a day. Here in the Fog Creek offices, we have 10 small conversations about FogBUGZ 3.0 development every day.

What I don’t understand is people who think it’s OK to move the developers ten time zones away from their managers and expect good results. Those same people would scream bloody murder if you told them that you were going to send the whole management team to Bangalore or Beijing.