Usability Checklist
From Devsummit
Contents |
Watch Your Users
You don't have to spend a lot of money doing user studies in lab-like conditions. Ask your board members to use your software. Find people in coffee shops.
When you're observing your users, give them a task, shut up, and take notes. Resist the temptation to help or correct your users. It's also helpful to ask users to talk about what they're doing as they do it.
If your tool is a web-based application, study your web logs to see the pages people are visiting as well as the paths they are following. You can also use free tools like Google Analytics to help identify "hotspots" on your web pages.
Talk to Your Users
Use surveys and focus groups to find out what your users want or what they think about your tools.
Techniques like innovation games can be even more effective than surveys and focus groups for eliciting knowledge from users.
Clustering Techniques
There are many variations of clustering/brainstorming techniques that you can use to help understand your users and guide the design of your tools.
Card sorting is a simple and effective technique for determining menu and navigation structure. All it takes is a stack of index cards, 3-6 users, and 20 minutes of one-on-one time with each user to be effective. There are also online card sorting tools, such as at MindCanvas.
Do Usability Early
Usability is like security; it's not something you can just tack on after the software is already written. To be effective at it, usability should be an early and constant part of the development process.
When designing your tool, develop the mockups first. You can even do usability tests before a line of code is written using a technique called paper prototyping.
Pair a designer with a developer. Have the two work closely together throughout the entire process.
Constantly Collect and Study Data
Usability is not subjective. It's not about one person "knowing" what users want. Usability is about surfacing hard data about how users behave and about making decisions based on that hard data.
Ask yourself this: Do you know the most frequently accessed features on your tool?
In addition to being useful for design, the data can be useful for making business-cases for usability. Why spend $25K on advertising if it's clear that your users go to your site but can't find the right content? Isn't it better to spend that $25K on usability so that every site visit results in a conversion?
