I’ve just finished reading Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug, the web usability guru who wrote the celebrated Don’t Make Me Think.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a very practical, hands-on guide for anyone interested in running usability tests on their websites. It’s also very short - it only took me 3 hours - so I recommend you read it. However, to try and give you a brief summary, Krug basically has 6 maxims:
1. A morning a month, that’s all we ask – he believes that you should schedule a usability test session once a month to last for a morning and to be followed by a debrief over lunch
2. Start earlier than you think makes sense – if you’re testing a new site, start by testing the scribble on the napkin
3. Recruit loosely & grade on a curve – when you’re looking for people to come in and test your website during these sessions, don’t get too hung up on finding people that fit the profile of your ideal customer, not to start with anyway
4. Make it a spectator sport – you must make it a priority to get as many internal observers along to these sessions as you can, especially senior management
5. Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the most important problems - each session should result in a list of the top 10 issues on your site and you should spend the next month fixing them
6. When fixing problems, always do the least you can do – he has seen too many usability tests fail because the suggested fixes became over-complex. If there’s an issue on your site that is affecting sales, find the simplest way to solve it…and then solve it.
He also provides sample scripts, checklists, and documentation to get you up and running. If you’ve got any interest at all in usability testing, then you need to get hold of a copy:
Thanks to Matt Curry for the book recommendation.
