Comments on: OJR's 'five guide' to do-it-yourself website usability testing http://www.ojr.org/ojrs-five-guide-to-do-it-yourself-website-usability-testing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ojrs-five-guide-to-do-it-yourself-website-usability-testing Focusing on the future of digital journalism Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:43:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Steve Yelvington http://www.ojr.org/ojrs-five-guide-to-do-it-yourself-website-usability-testing/#comment-883 Steve Yelvington Mon, 06 Aug 2007 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.ojr.org/?p=1341#comment-883 Find the most egregious mistakes. Fix them quickly. And then test again to find the next most egregious mistakes. Repeat the process until your website no longer makes your users cry.

The hard part isn’t conducting the test, or identifying the errors, or even fixing them.

The hard part is resisting the temptation to turn the process into a Big Deal.

This “five guide” is a great step in the right direction.

But even this guide slips a bit into the analysis trap.

Beware of quantifying your data. Don’t look for averages. Just look for screwups, and fix them fast. Don’t write any reports longer than one page and make them bullet points of issues to be addressed.

I had to fill out a Skymiles form on Delta’s website today. Apparently nobody ever tested the thing with real people, because I got stuck in a loop, bounced back to an error page whose messages did not match the actual “error.”

The web is rife with those kinds of design and implementation errors. You’ll get the biggest return on your investment of time and energy by going after the low-hanging fruit of bad usability.

]]> By: Robert Niles http://www.ojr.org/ojrs-five-guide-to-do-it-yourself-website-usability-testing/#comment-882 Robert Niles Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:40:02 +0000 http://www.ojr.org/?p=1341#comment-882 Since its our own CMS, we can make it do pretty much whatever we want… so long as there is reader demand. I’m not quite sure exactly what functionality you’re looking for here, but if you want to either comment again, or e-mail me via the link at the bottom of the page, with a little more detail, I’d be happy to try to whip up something useful.

]]> By: Tom Abate http://www.ojr.org/ojrs-five-guide-to-do-it-yourself-website-usability-testing/#comment-881 Tom Abate Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:26:50 +0000 http://www.ojr.org/?p=1341#comment-881 Authors: awesome piece. Clear, terse, practical and authoritative. Thanks.

Editors: In future how-to pieces of this sort could you make it easy for readers who implement the instuctions to share any widgets or spreadsheets they might create? If that is difficult or risky than just accept thanks and encouragement for more nitty-gritty stuff of this caliber and tone.

any

]]>