My thoughts after Steve Krug’s presentation “The Web Usability Diet” at An Event Apart, Boston.
There are a few books every web designer needs to read. Steve’s Don’t make me think is one such book. Heck, anyone who wants to build anything on the web ought to own his book. A large proportion of the audience at the conference already do, going by the number of raised hands.
Steve’s presentation is nothing very new; he reiterates the need for reiterative user testing (reuse of the word ‘reiterate’ intentional. Really.).
Basically in a nutshell, user testing need not be elaborate. It need not be expensive. There is no need for one-way mirrors, multiple video cameras and an army of testers. Camtasia is helpful, but Steve’s point is to reduce the cost (time, effort and money) of user testing and do it often.
The thing I need clarification is this: when are good points in a project to conduct user testing? Steve recommended conducting user tests monthly, but so far most of his examples were people testing products that were already built. In the event you were overhauling entire sites, like I am, when is a good time to jump in? I’ve emailed Steve these questions and will post his answer when I receive it.
For my work, we’ve done a very basic user testing on a proposed information structure for the site. Tree diagrams are printed on paper and users were given tasks to perform. The objective of which was to see if they’d cascade down the right tree.
Steve was absolutely correct that major usability problems jump out at you. They’re not hard to find. That one small round of user tests revealed quite a number of flaws - many of which lay in the labelling of our content areas.
Conflict of Interest
Another point that came to mind was this: the reason why developers are hesitant to conduct user testing is because it results in more work. From an ideological viewpoint, everyone whould strive to produce the best product they possibly can, yadda yadda, but when your user tests reveal the need to manually migrate half a million web pages to another section of the site, your team members aren’t quite laughing with enthusiasm. A third party consultant like Steve himself might be useful in deflecting some of the heat the project manager would otherwise have had to take on.
Call to arms
For those of you who do not yet know, I’m working for the Ministry of Education in Singapore and we’re undergoing a huge revamp. If you’re interested to help us with user testing, drop me a note at my contact page.
While there is a need to run this past my bosses, I hope to involve members of the public in the revamp. This goes against probably all processes the government is used to, so no promises on my part.