Week 5 Readings

Steven Krug’s chapter 8 “The farmer and the cowman” is about the different personnel involved in creating a website. These different individuals have backgrounds that influence the way they believe a website should work. Individuals like PM, Developer, Designer, and Marketing have their own set agendas that needs to be evaluated when coming to a consensus in web development. Most web teams have a myth that there is an “Average user” and that if they can design to meet the needs of this user then the website will be functional. The truth is that there is no real “Average user” and that everyone uses and interacts with a website differently. This is why the next chapter on usability testing becomes such an important factor.
Chapter 9 “Why didn’t we do this sooner” is about effective yet inexpensive ways to do usability testing. Often teams try to do usability testing towards the end of a project when the site is about to go live. This is not the correct approach. It is better to do even small amounts of testing very early because this can have more of an impact in saving time and money by correcting mistakes before the mistakes are really entrenched in the website. The author was also very adamant about making a distinction between focus groups (small group of people asked to give reactions to a design or ideas) and usability testing (one on one testing of the functionality of a website). Many development teams still feel that usability testing is cost prohibitive but this is not the case. You can run test with 3-4 (anyone) people multiple times rather than with costly (representative) that must be recruited. The main point of the chapter is test early and often with smaller numbers of testers rather than one time with large numbers of testers.
http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources
http://www.noupe.com/how-tos/usability-testing-toolkit-resources-articles-and-techniques.html
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/09/10/usability-tools-podcast-5-second-usability-tests/