Web Site Usability

Chapter 1 - The How and Why of Usability Testing

"Web Site Usability" means, of course, that the web site does what's it's supposed to do for the person using it.

Since every person is different, this means that true usability is tough to pin down, and though we will spend much time in this class learning how to come close, in the end there is only one group of experts, and that is your users.

Therefore, the two most important concepts you can take away from this class are

1. Designer/Programmer Humility
2. User Testing for Usability

We will begin with Concept One.

Click here for a story about falsely blaming yourself. Click here for a story about bad labeling leading to hunger.

In both of these cases, the designers and programmers assumed that because their designs were perfectly logical to them, that they should be equally obvious to any reasonably smart person.

However, if your customers are important to your business, you cannot make that assumption. You have to test. Usually the very first person outside yourself that tries to accomplish something on your site finds something jaw-droppingly unclear. ("Oh, yeah...well...oh yeah, I meant to change that yesterday...right.")

People who think "That's your problem if you're stupid, not mine" don't understand that the better you understand something, the simpler you can make it for others.

This is why, when you ask someone to test your site, you tell them "This is not a test of you, but of (my, our, the) design. If we did our part right, you'll have no trouble with the exercise. If you have trouble, it's on our head, not yours."

Companies like Microsoft must test their products on thousands of users to see whether their ideas on ease-of-use pan out, and even then, they get it wrong sometimes (viz., the Office Paperclip guy). Each of us probably has our own pet peeve with the products we use, something annoying, something that makes us stumble, something that the testers didn't catch.

The good news with web sites is that we can catch most of the problems with only a few testers, if we do the testing early enough in the process, and at strategic points along the way.

And it's the web, not a printed brochure or shrink-wrapped software package. We can fix it.

1. Whose problem is it? Confusion of Return and Enter keys in "The Design of Everyday Things" - p. 34
2. "But it's RIGHT THERE" Ordering Lunch (Kelly Goto's story)
3. Costs associated with fixing defects at various times in the development cycle. (1:10:100)
• Examples from User Experience Magazine
• Joe Grant's example (www.grantconsulting.com)
4. High End User Testing
• High-end Usability Lab
5. More Efficient User Testing - How many are necessary?
• Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users
6. The Usability ToolBox - different kinds of user testing
   • Methods Table - from Usability.net - clickable table to let you choose from the toolbox for your situation (2003)
   • Long long list of usability testing methods

Discussion: The Web Development Life Cycle - When do you do the testing?

 

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