In his book, “Rocket Surgery Made Easy,” Steve Krug promotes an excellent “do-it-yourself” approach to finding (and fixing) website usability problems. While he recommends hiring professionals for evaluation, he also admits few can afford that luxury and, instead, provides tips for simple user testing that most anyone can perform to expose problems.
Krug’s type of informal, do-it-yourself tests are definitely qualitative in the sense that they cannot prove anything, nor are they used to gather data. Rather, they involve observations of tasks being carried out by the test participants while they think out loud. Krug suggests this simple approach works because most serious problems tend to be easily identified and because watching users improves the designer’s skills and intuition.
Even if you’ve never done user testing in the past, you should consider performing this type of checkup periodically to gain insights for improvement. Some website owners are reluctant because their production schedule is too tight for this “extra” step, or maybe they are hesitant to reveal their work before it’s finished—after all, “Why expose problems we already know about?” Maybe you feel as though you lack experience, don’t have a large enough test pool, or can rely on Google Analytics (GA) to tell the story. But one participant is really all you need, and data from GA can’t tell you why users do what they do.
Even if you don’t have firsthand experience with testing, it can be a valuable exercise that saves you time later on. It doesn’t have to be a big production, but chances are, you’ll be surprised at what you uncover. You can start small—just get started!
