In his latest book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Steve Krug debunks the misconception that it takes a lot of money and resources to test your website for usability. You can actually accomplish a lot in one morning a month by offering three users a relatively small amount to do basic tasks while you watch and listen. So if this is so simple, why do so many sites suffer from what seem to be obvious usability problems?
- Testing is done, but with staff from your organization (to save money). For the best results, you need to recruit users who are not already familiar with your company, product or services and who don’t have any vested interests in how to respond
- Testing occurs too late in website development process, when it is too late to address the issues that come up
- Management isn’t involved in the usability testing process, and as a result they don’t understand why its findings are so valuable
- Organization decides not to make changes until the next major site redesign; as Steve mentions, often a minor tweak is enough to solve a problem
- There is confusion about what your major site objectives are; this often causes your home page to have too much information and satisfies your internal departments but not your intended user audience
- Trying to do too much; it’s best to focus on those issues which are causing confusion for the most users and are the most serious (not simply an inconvenience)
- Site design requires too many steps to complete most common objectives or provides too many distractions which take user off task
Many of us have looked at our website so often that we know how everything works, and where in the menu we need to go to find certain tasks. But we are not our audience. Take the time to do some website usability testing, and you will be surprised how frustrated your users get trying to do simple things, like complete a financial transaction. To learn more, read Steve Krug’s earlier book Don’t Make Me Think, and subscribe to updates from Jakob Nielsen’s UseIt.com site.
