[Sigia-l] Testing your own sites

[Ziya Oz]

Michael Albers:

> advancing IA as a profession does require use of a full usability lab.

It does????
 
> 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.

Yep, you *are* an academic. :-)

> 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.

Well, 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.

Singling out factors to test is a difficult task in and of itself, but I'm
not sure what relevance a "full usability lab" has in that matter?
 
> The overall problem is highly complex and much more than the sum of
> its parts.

Quite. But I'm still not sure what that has to do with the *requirement* of
a "full usability lab"?

----
Ziya

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted,
they would have asked for a faster horse." -- Henry Ford