Usability

From the Boxes and Arrows blog:

They did an interview with Steve Krug, who wrote a most eye-opening book on web usability, Don’t Make Me Think…

“But in the meantime I’ve had a change of heart, and decided to do an updated edition of Don’t Make Me Think first, then write the how-to testing book. The second edition of Think is due out later this year.”

So, two books:
1. Updated version of Don’t Make Me Think – should be a good one to pick up
2. He’s planning to write a how-to book on low-cost/no-cost usability testing.

When they come out, READ BOTH OF THEM.

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I just read this – DonnaM’s Writing memorable scenarios for usability testing. Good stuff!

To sum it up… when you do a usability test, you usually ask a bunch of scenario-type questions. Your test participant then tries to answer the question by finding an answer on your website. Easy enough, right?

The hard part is writing those questions! When doing a general test for the whole website, your questions have to cover lots of territory – you want at least one question for each “important thing” on your website, while at the same time realizing that no one’s going to sit through a grueling 200 question test (well, not unless you pay them actual money…)

And you want those questions to make sense to the participant. Librarian lingo should be removed (think monograph, reference, ILL, ILS, etc.), hints should be removed (no “go to this page, look in the upper left hand corner, and see if you can find such-and-such”), and
the question should be easy to read.

And DonnaM goes one more step – her post discusses giving the question a real-life scenario. That way, you make the question more vivid and emotional to the test participant. This helps the participant visualize the scenario, thus making it easier for the participant to remember. And ultimately helps the test participant add some realism to his/her answer (thus providing more useful information during the usability test).

Wow – lots to think about for those embarking on usability testing!

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From someone’s comments on a previous post -

From Anonymous:
I have found Nielsen to be the most overrated web site design “guru” out there. I read his book “Designing Web Usability” and found it to be pretty far from what I would consider good advice for a web designer, at least in the library world. Maybe if you’re designing a site for the movie “Troy” or some other site for entertainment, Nielsen is the one to turn to. I’m not pointing to specifics, admittedly, but as everybody seems to fawn over Nielsen, I needed to stand up and say that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Actually, I’d call it a case of trying to stuff the emperor into farmer’s clothing. Annonymous doesn’t like Neilsen’s ideas – that’s fine. No problem there. But from the comment, I’m not sure this person understands what Neilsen does. Neilsen doesn’t do Web Design – he does Usability. I find the two concepts to be very different:

• Web design – making a nice-looking website, involving graphics, colors, content, css and other standards, etc.
• Web usability – making sure that people can use the website.

Neilsen really focuses on usability. Even in his articles about web design mistakes, he mainly discusses usability issues. Now obviously, a usable website will probably be a well-designed website. But from the above comments about Neilsen’s web design book, it seemed to me that the concept of web design vs. the concept of usability could get sorta mangled – because Neilsen usually doesn’t talk about CSS positioning, Flash-enabled layouts, or drop-down menus. Instead, he focuses on making what you have placed on your website into a very usable website – so website visitors can find information quickly and painlessly, and get on with their lives.

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