I created this menu an digital illustration of what NOT to do when designing a useful experience for your audience. Remind you of anything?
Whether you can get through the menu or not, we learn a valuable lesson. Keep the answers to the questions your readers are searching for in easy to find, easy to see places. Use search and browse techniques for sites with a large volume of information. Properly label your web pages for easy searching. Don't loose site of design fundamentals when designing complex layouts or user interfaces. Use common sense!
What is usability? Most people, when walking down the hallway, pass the usability person, or the usability department and they think, "Whatever the hell that is..." or "how much are we paying those people".
Well let me explain: A usability specialist is a facilitator for unbiased testing. To function property usability testing needs to meet certain criteria. Usability testing must:
• be unbiased
• be properly facilitated
• attended by the hidden core project team
• be non-aesthetic based
• have a specific task to accomplish
The project team is usually hidden behind a 2-way mirror in a sound-proofed room so they don't scream and jump out of their chairs with "THE BUTTON IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FAAAAACE." Because they will, no joke. And the whole team has to see the results first hand -everyone on the same page. When you see your first study, you'll instantly realize the value.
For example, if you want to test a mortgage calculator, you have to get somebody out there from the public who generally represents your target market, who may be eligible for owning a home, or at least be in the ballpark "a typical user". And you take this person into a room and have a non-project-related unbiased person say, "here's our mortgage calculator", can you tell me how much you can borrow?
Then you watch.
You watch closely and you don't answer any of their questions. You answer their questions with questions: What would you expect it to do? How would you proceed if you can't continue? What do you think it means?
And the you do it again with several other users, as many as budget and time can afford. (make the time, spend the money)
These tests provide remarkable feedback almost 100% of the time. You learn about people's behavior towards your end product. If you find patterns of behavior you can alter your information design to reflect people's mental model. If you find nothing you're product is ready to release. If you find no one can figure out how much they can borrow, or that they don't trust the answers they got because they weren't clear about some of the questions, CHANGE, RETEST, REPEAT.
During my time with USAA, the integrated financial services company serving the military community, I had the privilege of working with a world class usability staff, not to mention a world class usability facility. We would test our html prototypes with real people, company members who had a real vested interest, but an unbiased stance. If you have never sat through a usability study, you cannot imagine it's usefulness. Every project stands to gain from this experience. You have to test your product in a controlled environment in order to improve the design before it gets released to your market. Just imagine how many revisions Dyson went through to charge $500 for a vacuum cleaner -and get it. Well your site's usability should go through at LEAST a handful of unbiased users, who do not personally know the designers or any project team members.
Totally unbiased testing, directed by a usability specialist, in a usability testing environment is invaluable for learning where your product or website fails, where people bail out in a process and why. What information where they needing at different times, why?
Why guess? You may find your project is on track. More often you'll find glaring mistakes that were stemmed from decisions made on assumptions of experts designing tools for people who are, in many cases, novices. Find your market, get the mouse in front of them, find an intermediary to ask the right questions, and provide no answers, let them try to complete your desired task. Let them fail or succeed. Find out where they fail, provide help at that point in the process.