Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. I?’m here at the Voices That Matter Conference here in Nashville, Tennessee and I have the pleasure of interviewing Steve Krug, Krug, pardon me, usability consultant and author of the best selling book, DON?’T MAKE ME THINK. Steve thanks for agreeing to this interview.
STEVE KRUG: Sure.
BILL: I?’ve got a question for you, I had mentioned to you earlier that I represent a lot of generalists, webmasters, many of those you know, have a variety of responsibilities and also I represent those that teach those generalists. For that audience, could you give us a couple of, you know, tips on when it comes to usability, what they should focus in on.
STEVE: My favorite tip this year is to watch some people use what you?’re building, which technically is a usability test, or a user test. But just grab somebody and give them a task that is the kind of thing that people are going to want to do on your site, and watch them try and do it. And the advanced version is have them think out loud while they?’re doing it and tell you what they?’re looking at, what they?’re thinking about, whatever. And you?’ll find almost immediately they?’ll reveal to you the problems that your site has in terms of usability. They?’ll run into things that confuse them, they?’ll run into things that don?’t make sense to them, and often the fixes are quite simple. But they?’re not things that you can discover yourself, because if you?’ve been working on a site, you?’re too close to it and you?’re not going to be able to see those problems. So it?’s just enormously valuable to drag one person, I tell people to do like three people a month or something, but one is 100% better than none.
BILL: Yeah, I appreciate that.
STEVE: So if you haven?’t done it, then it?’s the one thing I would most highly recommend to anybody if they want to improve the usability of their website.
BILL: I appreciate that. And good point. So if you had the luxury of taking that up a notch, three people a month?
STEVE: Yeah, I tell people to do it one morning a month. And in that morning you?’re going to bring three people in. And you spend up to an hour with each one of them and give them the same tasks to do. And set it up so that the people, there are people on your team, so that they can observe this from another room. It?’s easy to set up screen-sharing on another pc. And what I recommend is then over lunch, after the three tests in the morning, everybody on the team, the stakeholders and whoever, get together and decide what the problems were that they saw in the morning and how they?’re going to fix them before next month. And that?’s your usability program for the month.
BILL: Fair enough.
STEVE: You?’re all done in one morning.
BILL: I?’m curious to know then, would it be fair enough to say that you?’d want to get somebody who would generally use your site anyway?
STEVE: You want to if you can, but I?’m really careful trying to get people not to hung up on that. I mean, you want to get people, if you can, who are typical users of your site. But if actual users are, typical users are hard for you to come by, then I would say don?’t not test. Instead just test with anybody you can get. Because almost anybody will run into the worst problems, even if they?’re not your typical audience. So it?’s mostly a kind of Nike, kind of “Just Do It” thing, is the most important thing. And if you just try it you?’ll quickly see why it?’s so valuable. Because you just get insights. You can get a very large number of valuable insights in a very short time.
BILL: Excellent. Thanks.
STEVE: So you?’ll get psyched about doing it.
BILL: Yeah, great feedback Steve. I appreciate that. Bill Cullifer here with eth World Organization of Webmasters (WOW).
STEVE: Nice talking to you.
BILL: With Steve Krug at the Web conference in Nashville.
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