Making Life (and usability testing) Easy on World Usability Day
Posted Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 5:10 pm by Amy (20 posts)
Did you know that today marks the 6th annual celebration of World Usability Day?
Usability practitioners are celebrating in all sorts of crazy ways – attending some of the myriad workshops and demos and online events, buying t-shirts and, of course, tweeting through it all.
At Beaconfire, I’m celebrating by thumbing through the copy of Rocket Surgery Made Easy that arrived in my office this very morning. I’m giddy. I had wanted the book since listening to Steve Krug, the author, at the UserFocus conference in DC last month. His previous book, Don’t Make Me Think, put forth a ‘common sense approach to usability testing.’ It’s a simple but insightful resource that makes the concept of usability accessible for a wide range of people.
In his follow-up, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Krug provides a how-to guide for creating, running and evaluating usability testing sessions. A caveat here… he says, “If you can afford to hire a professional to do your testing for you – and it doesn’t consumer your entire budget in one session – do it.” I support that idea completely and encourage you to contact Beaconfire if you are looking for usability consulting. :)
On the other hand, if you are interested in making your site more usable but your budget is tight, grab this book and then spend some time watching your web site users interact with your site. It will make you see your website in an entirely different way. I promise.
I’m going to save the point-by-point review for you until I’ve actually read the book. Remember, I just got it this morning. In the meantime, if you’ve done usability testing on your site – especially sessions that you’ve designed and run in-house – how did they go?
