A member of a web-design team is also a web-user and sometimes it turns out to be very hard to check the personal preferences at the door. Plus, there is also a professional perspective on what constitutes good Web design. Another level of complexity to any discussion of usability issue is given by the necessary promises made for attracting capital.
Avoid religious debate – discussion where people are expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven. They rarely result in anyone involved changing his or her point of view.
Test and watch people carefully as they try to figure out what you have designed and how to use it.
A focus group is a small group of people talking about things, like their opinions about products, past experiences and reactions to new concepts. A focus group is useful for getting a sampling of users’ feelings and opinions. It is best used in the planning stages of a project. It can help you finding out whether you are building the right product.
Usability tests are about watching one user trying to do something on a website so you can detect and fix things that confuses or frustrate him. Usability tests should be used through the entire process.
- watch other people trying to use your site because after you have worked on a site you know too much.
- test early in the project
- a small number of users, not necessarily to be in the audience
- list the three most serious usability problems you noticed
- decide what to fix – you should always start by fixing the most serious problems first
Do-It yourself usability testing