You want to make your products better, easier to user. The best way to do that is to watch people using them, getting feedback about what problems exist, and then fixing those problems.
“Watching real users gives them that eureka moment: they’re not all like me, and in fact, they’re not all like anybody…This profoundly and permanently changes your relationship to users, making you a better developer, designer, manager, or whatever you are.”
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug is a great introduction to usability testing that would be useful if you want to improve a product, especially a web site, and don’t have an expert on staff. It is a brief and useful introduction to usability testing for non-usability specialists.
This book provides a good definition of Usability Testing.
“Watching people try to use what you’re creating/designing/building (or something you’ve already created/designed/built), with the intention of (a) making it easier for people to use or (b) proving that it is easy to use.”
The approach recommended in this book is that some testing is better than none and that anyone can do usability testing.
“Testing with one user is 100% better than testing with none.”
“‘Do-it-yourself’ usability tests are definitely qualitative. The purpose isn’t to prove anything; it’s to get insights that enable you to improve what you’re building.”
This type of testing is frequently known as Discount Usability Testing. Discount testing has been around for two decades. For example, Jared Spool and Carolyn Snyder taught a class named Product Usability Survival Techniques which was a great one day workshop on paper prototyping and usability testing. The book reminds me of the type of material that could be covered in a conference tutorial. Of course, is should. The author states that this book came from his experience of teaching one day tutorials on usability testing.
I think analytics can be extremely useful in understanding how products are used. For example, you can get a sense of how many times each page of a web site is viewed. And I recommend anyone involved in experience design learn how to use analytics. But, I also agree with the author that analytics only tell part of the story.
“while analytics can tell you in great detail what people are doing on your site, they can’t tell you why they’re doing those things.”
The book takes the discount usability idea one step further. That is, not only should the testing be discount, the fixes should also be the least expensive.
“You’re not interested in what it takes to uncover most of the problems; you only care about what it takes to uncover as many problems as you can fix.”
“When fixing problems, try to do the least you can do.”
If you want to understand the basics of how to conduct a usability test, Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug is a great place to start.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy is available on Amazon.
Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.