The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact on the design process. Slower methods should be deferred to an annual usability checkup.
Using a linear diagram to plot data from website traffic logs can lead you to overlook important conclusions. Sometimes advanced visualizations are worth the effort.
The relative popularity of a site's pages, the number of visitors referred by other sites, and the traffic from search queries continue to follow a Zipf distribution.
Usability goes beyond the level of individual users interacting with screens. It's also a question of how easy or cumbersome it is for the entire organization to use a system.
Measuring the live impact of design changes on key business metrics is valuable, but often creates a focus on short-term improvements. This near-term view neglects bigger issues that only qualitative studies can find.
Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief.
User research offers a learning opportunity that can help you build an understanding of user behavior, but you must resolve discrepancies between research findings and your own beliefs.
Testing ever-more users in card sorting has diminishing returns, but test at least 15 users -- 3 times more than you would in traditional usability tests.
To ensure high response rates and avoid misleading survey results, keep your surveys short and ensure that your questions are well written and easy to answer.
Designs that engage and empower users increase their enjoyment and encourage them to explore websites in-depth. Once we achieve ease of use, we'll need additional usability methods to further strengthen joy of use.
Field studies should emphasize the observation of real user behavior. Simple field studies are fast and easy to conduct, and do not require a posse of anthropologists: All members of a design team should go on customer visits.
Although measuring usability can cost four times as much as conducting qualitative studies (which often generate better insight), metrics are sometimes worth the expense. Among other things, metrics can help managers track design progress and support decisions about when to release a product.
Focus groups and surveys study users'
opinions - not actual behavior - so they are misleading
for the design of interactive systems like websites.
Automated usability measures are just as misleading.
How to collect usability data from site users, using a historical archive as the case study. Keep surveys simple, collect data from real-world usage, and get feedback from friends of the site.
Website usage must be tracked to plan server capacity needs and future business models. Examples show use of regression statistics to predict future traffic patterns.
Focus groups can be a powerful tool in system development, but they should not be the only source of information about user behavior. In interactive systems development, the proper role of focus groups is not to assess interaction styles or design usability, but to discover what users want from the system.
Discount usability engineering is our only hope. We must evangelize methods simple enough that departments can do their own usability work, fast enough that people will take the time, and cheap enough that it's still worth doing. The methods that can accomplish this are simplified user testing with one or two users per design and heuristic evaluation.