Traveling is hard. Traveling with children is especially hard. A number of things can go wrong, making the trip difficult or even nonexistent. Some problems are nuisances (sick and/or hungry kids, delayed flights, or the wrong sized rental car), while other problems will lead to failure, which in this case means not reaching your destination
Errors happen and unintended actions are inevitable. They are a common occurrence in usability tests and are the result of problems in an interface and imperfect human actions. It is valuable to have some idea about what these are, how frequently they occur, and how severe their impact is. First, what is an error? Slips
If you collect nothing else in a usability test it should be a list of problems encountered by users. It seems so simple yet there is a rich history of how many users you need to test, what constitutes a problem and which method to use. A usability problem should have a name, description and
It’s good to think positively, but sometimes, negative thinking can solve problems more effectively. There’s no shortage of problems on websites and software. Many of them are interaction problems. Users can’t login Visitors can’t find the products in the navigation Customers are calling support Sales are low Conversion rate are down Fixing Symptoms not Problems
Usability doesn’t have to be expensive, time consuming or involve lots of users. Jakob Nielsen popularized this discount approach two decades ago. A focus on finding and fixing problems by testing early and often with small-samples generates major insights. More recently Steve Krug has taken this informal approach to the masses by encouraging website owners
Just how common are usability problems in websites and software? Surprisingly there is very little out there on the frequency of usability problems. Part of the reason is that most usability testing happens early in the development phase and is at best documented for an internal audience. Once a website is launched or product released
Does this man need back surgery? Does this woman have breast cancer? Does this website have usability problems? Chances are you’re not qualified to answer the first two questions but probably able to provide some answers about the third. This image comes from the Hotel Pennsylvania website. It was the subject of
If you ask five users to take a look at a website or application you will find usability problems. If you fix those problems then ask another five users you will get another set of problems. Over time there will be fewer and fewer problems found, but a new set of users will still continue
While testing with five users might reveal 85% of problems that impact 31% of users (given a set of tasks and user-type), it doesn’t mean you’re finding 85% of the critical problems. Are severe usability problems likely to occur more frequently, less frequently or is problem severity independent of frequency? The data on this is
Why isn’t usability testing done more? And when it is done why is the sample size small? One major reason is the cost. It takes a lot of money and time to bring users into a lab and conduct a usability test. Even if users don’t get compensated for their time, it still takes a
