InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

February 14, 2000

Web-Site Usability:
Get The Right Answers From Testing

By Jakob Nielsen and Donald A. Norman

lthough nothing can substitute for a professional user-experience group, a lot can be accomplished quickly and easily, with little time, effort, or expense. The main secret is to observe real people doing real tasks. Ask if you can visit customers in their offices or homes.

Even though friends, colleagues, and spouses aren't likely to be exactly like your real customers, you can learn a lot by observing them. But watch them do real tasks, not some artificial errand that you made up. Watch as they answer questions that are of interest to them, as they search for products, as they try to make purchases--real ones. Offer to pay if need be. If a tester needs a printer, offer reimbursement if he or she will let you watch her experience. A couple of $500 printers are a lot cheaper than driving customers to another site en masse.

Watch. Don't interrupt. Don't offer to help no matter how great the temptation. Don't ask why they have done something until after the session is all over. In fact, you should sit behind them so you aren't in the way.

If you need to bring people to your location for the observations, invite one person at a time so that you can observe that person's natural behavior without the bias introduced by the presence and comments of other people. Watch each person perform a set of typical tasks with the site. For example, on a business site, it might be reasonable to ask customers to research a product purchase and determine which member of a product line best fits their needs. On an airline site, ask them what they typically do at a travel site, then watch as they try it on yours.

Although it's best to observe representative customers, tests of colleagues, friends, or spouse are better than no tests at all. If your friends, colleagues, or spouse have trouble with the site, beware. Web sites are so bad that the major problems can be found with very simple tests that take only about a day to run. Those tests certainly would have found the problems we encountered with the Hewlett-Packard and Canon sites (see sidebar story, "Walk-Through: A Usability Experiment").

Return to main story, "Usability On The Web Isn't A Luxury."

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page