Usability - Rapid Recruiting
January 20, 2003
One of the problems facing experience design in many large companies is the lack of usability testing early in the concept and design phase. All too often testing is put off or cancelled outright due to the complexity and cost. In many cases I have experienced this because it seems to upper management to be easier to push something live and then fix it later. The costs to this approach are very high on many plains — from a customer conversion to a development cost perspective.
The latest alertbox by Jakob Nielson, describes methodologies for doing usability testing rapidly, with few users, and minimal costs. Given this doctrine and the proven value of testing on ROI there really is no reason to not test before you build.
Some of the key rules to rapid testing include:
- Get representative users
- Ask them to perform representative tasks with the design
- Shut up and let the users do the talking