Remote usability testing allows you to get customer insights when travel budgets are small, timeframes are tight, or test participants are hard to find.
For testing assignments where client teams are ready, willing and able to take immediate action, being flexible with tasks within and between participants can offer better bang for your buck.
What's worth the most: field studies or user tests? Depends on your company's usability maturity, but user testing is the safe bet if you can do only one thing.
Create low-fidelity, low-commitment rapid user interface prototypes to can get early user feedback. Video shows how to conduct user testing of these simulated screens, with examples of the kinds of usability problems you can discover by testing different kinds of prototypes.
It's more difficult to conduct usability studies with experienced users than with novices, and the improvements are usually smaller. Still, improving expert performance is often worth the effort.
Enemies of usability claim that because 'the experts disagree,' they can safely ignore user advocates' expertise and run with whatever design they personally prefer.
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.
