No subject

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RE: gMeta's free usability audit
http://www.gmeta.com/strategy/strat_expert_audit.htm

A couple of factors:

1) The market and the critical success factors of Web designers may be
significantly different in Northern Ireland than in North America, and

2) The motivating factors of gMeta may be significantly different from
yours or ours.

gMeta claims to measure things like "happiness" and "precision" against
contexts such as "metaphor" and "labelling".  They result in a
not-so-intuitive to me "radar chart" that would probably confuse anyone
not expert enough to understand the process in the first place.  The
freebie, of course, is a "foot-in-the-door" intro designed to lead to
further (paid) testing.

But the process seems to me to be rather sideways.  IMO, an expert audit
should be measuring more-or-less tangibles such as consistency,
readability, compatibility with various browsers and monitors (like
their page isn't), mapping the structure to the audience(s), etc., and
not "happiness".  In the hands of an expert, a site usability audit
should be very clear, specific, and probably not need to rely upon user
testing for validation.  It has an intrinsic and a high value, and if
you're planning on offering them for free and you are good at them,
you'd better be using them to entice high-paying business.  The testing
should be for specific corrections, additions, etc., or to reconcile the
needs of diverse target audiences, or the other "usual" reasons you need
to do testing, and not merely to say, "See, told you so" about the
audit.

Of course, this requires that your "expert" auditor is indeed expert.  I
don't know the gMeta folks, and they may be very good, but I don't get a
sense of real value from looking at that page, even after I opened a
browser it would actually load in.
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