[Sigia-l] Testing your own sites

[Michael Albers]

I'll strongly agree that close user contact gives the best results 
for a specific project, whether watching them or working with them 
informally in their environment.

In those cases, a full usability lab isn't very good.  However, 
advancing IA as a profession does require use of a full usability 
lab.  (Warning, I'm an academic, so I'm rather biased on what follows.)

The purpose of testing a specific design, like the web site you are 
building for a client, is to maximize that design.  It's very hard to 
try out new and different methods since they can result in design 
failure.  Or worse, they work on project A and fail miserably on 
project B, when most things between the 2 projects seem to be the 
same.  So, of course, your boss says never to use that approach/design again.

Enter the academic use of the usability lab, doing formal studies 
with statistical significance on the various design features and 
methods to build the fundamental ideas for moving design 
forward.  This can help determine if it was project A or B that was 
the fluke.  The focus is not getting a single project out the door; 
it's figuring out what will work to improve out best practices (I 
know, dangerous phrase) and test out new ideas.  We hear that people 
don't like stories of "what worked for me" as evidence as best 
practice since there are always so many other factors.  Those other 
factors are always going to be there and will always be a real pain, 
but at least with formal testing of the fundamental concepts you use 
for creating the design, you can feel more confident that the big 
issues will arise from those other factors and not from the design itself.

The overall problem is highly complex and much more than the sum of 
its parts.  But let's make sure we do have a firm grasp of each of 
those parts.  Otherwise we'll never have a clue how to project the 
ripple effects across the entire system/culture (which will always be 
iffy anyway in a complex system).

Mike

>My general findings is what is good for client communication and 
>what is good to deliver the best possible project are, unsuprsingly, 
>not the same thing.  For example a usability lab is great for 
>clients, they can sit behind the glass, see real users say real 
>things and feel like they're in a hollywood movie.  The raw reality 
>is that for fact finding a usability lab offers no advantage over a 
>good researcher visiting the users in their native environment (and 
>I know many will disagree with this but the reason for this lies in 
>what I'm saying here).

>Users will often tell you why without needing to try and find it out 
>indirectly, this is uncovered if you understand where the use of a 
>interactive system fits within a larger context.  User research, in 
>my view, is really about the why - why do users do things.  This is 
>followed by what they need to do the tasks and finaly how they carry 
>out that task.


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Dr. Michael J. Albers
Professional Writing Program
Department of English
University of Memphis
Memphis  TN  38152
malbers at memphis.edu