The whole thing came about thanks to Twitter and a noisy neighbour. Not so long ago one of the Shepherd’s Bush twitterati @NelsMels, had to contend with a neighbour repeatedly and loudly playing ‘No Woman No Cry’ late at night. @NelsMels suggested on Twitter that some old skool drum & bass might work as revenge a means of drowning out the offending tune. I added a few bass laden suggestions of my own, as did @chrishampson and before we knew it we were reminiscing about some of our favourite 90s drum & bass tunes.

Then we thought we should get together somewhere, bring our favourite tunes and have an evening of drinks and drum & bass. As we discussed this idea, more and more W12 tweeters wanted to join in and since none of our places are exactly palatial, the idea of hiring a venue was born. @NelsMels used to DJ and even owned a couple of drum & bass labels, so she got on the case and before we knew it, the Raving Buddha was chosen and booked.

So in the best 90s drum & bass tradition, we moved from front room to dancehall and this is now very real and the deposit has been paid. We have the following DJs lined up (provisionally) and we may even have a few surprise special guests:

XO (Last.Fm, Bassdrive, Dogs On Acid)
Tendai (Swerve, Groove Connection)
Nexxi (G2 & Gain Recordings)
Zinga
Immortalmindz
Plastic
Ben Kei
J-Potz
DJ Lync

To give you an idea of the kind of tunes we are talking about, here are some links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFVHjZYoq4Q (LTJ Bukem – Horizons)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diaz0aQGGow (Photek – The Seven Samurai)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7nbPUNxFKE (DJ Rap – Spiritual Aura)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My_YHRIFrZg (Seba & Lotek – Sonic Winds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYHE4HtWgTM (PFM – The Western)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij2GVjuXrxM (Dillinja – The Angels Fell)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K4LdyPRhgY (Omni Trio – Renegade Snares)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9iC3Yo2A2Y (Adam F – Circles)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bitkNUl2mt0 (Roni Size – Trust Me)

If you fancy coming along or if you just want to keep up to date, please look for #bushw12 #dnbnight on Twitter or follow @cpetzny @NelsMels and @chrishampson OR ‘like’ our Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Urban-Jungle/244247792275388

Big thanks to everyone who has so far helped and encouraged our behaviour.

In order to test anything with users on the trading floors, we have to go to them, since there is little or no chance of dragging them away from their desk, even for short periods of time. This presents the first challenge. The trading floors are noisy, hectic and intense environments where you can expect frequent interruptions. Sales staff and traders can be very short on time and prone to distractions. Their ‘day job’ has to come first. Setting up an appointment in their calendars can occasionally work, but you are just as likely to walk into the middle of a small financial crisis using that approach, as you are by just ‘cold calling’.

Most banks will not allow the installation of prototypes or recording software on participants’ computers, so your test materials will have to be portable. This is where I’ve often encountered my next challenge, the lack of desk space. What with notepads, files, books, iPods, multiple keyboards and the telephone ‘dealerboard’, there is often little space left to set up your test materials.

Some of these challenges can be mitigated very easily. In the first instance, turn your laptop into a portable usability lab. There are plenty of software choices for both PC and Mac, but I prefer a combination of Silverback and Axure prototypes on an Apple Powerbook, or better yet on a Macbook Air.

Silverback is very lightweight, but is does a wonderful job of recording the screen as well as the participant’s face and voice. Clicks are highlighted in the recording by small ‘sonar pings’ and you can even add markers into the recording using an Apple Remote. Since everything is being recorded, the think aloud protocol works very well, and you will not need to crowd your participants with another person for note taking. If you are planning on recording video, take along a piece of electrical tape or a lump of blu-tack, just in case the participant does not want to be on recorded. Stick it over the camera so you can still record the conversation, if your participant agrees.

If you are using a laptop for testing, remember to bring a mouse and ensure it is similar to one the participants will be used to.

Try to keep the test sessions as short as possible, with the bare minimum of preamble. Focus on the key tasks and flows and keep them as short as you can. Remember that even a 15 minute session with most of the sales people and traders is likely to be pushing it, but you should be able to squeeze five to six short tasks into that time. Set up the next recording session before you get to the participant so the only thing you have to do is your short introduction.

So there really is no excuse for not testing, even in a challenging environment.

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

Greenwich Foot Tunnel – Opened in 1902, 370m long and just 15m deep, the tunnel is always great fun, take the DLR to Island Gardens and follow the signs. Walk around the left of the entrance building and through the little park (which is the actual Island Gardens) for a great view of Greenwich from across the river. At the time of writing, the lifts were being restored, so be prepared for quite a few steps at either end.

View from the Royal Observatory

Greenwich Royal Observatory – for the most stunning views of London, walk up the hill behind the National Maritime Museum (give that a miss while it’s being refurbished, unless you fancy a sarnie or an eclair from Paul on the mezzanine). Also, just below the observatory at the top and through a little gate, is an ancient looking stone plaque and a line on the wall. It’s the free version of the prime meridian and much more entertaining than the strange globe sculpture you pay to stand in front of.

Thames Clippers – The high speed river bus service runs all along the Thames and is very reasonable. It’s a fiver from Greenwich to Embankment and you can pay out of your Pay As You Go balance on your Oyster Card.

Natural History Museum

Spirit Collection Tours at the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre – Totally free and totally fascinating, even though they are nothing to do with ghosts or drinking. Alcohol is however involved in copious quantities to preserve the 22 million specimens. You’ll see some amazing pickled creatures, including a giant squid, a colossal squid, a coelacanth and some of the animals Darwin himself collected. You have to book your tour at the museum’s main reception, but they leave throughout the day until about 16:15.

Grant Museum – it’s one of the last remaining university zoological museums and has been recently rehoused. It’s a small, but fascinating collection of skeletons and pickled and stuffed animals. Some of the exhitied animals have long since vanished from the wild, so the museum is well worth a visit. Sadly it’s only open weekdays from 1-5pm.

Tate Modern

Tate Modern – amazing art and amazing architecture all under one roof. The Mark Rothko room is still one of my all time favourite places on earth. The main collection is free and the walk down the ramp into the old turbine hall from the main entrance takes you into one of London’s most impressive modernist interiors.

Tate Boat – if Tate Modern hasn’t quite fulfilled your artistic desires, head down to Southwark Pier and jump on the Tate Boat. It’s only a fiver on your Oyster card and takes you straight to Tate Britain (with just a short stop at Embankment). Tickets are available from the Thames Clippers hut at the pier or on board.

Main Hall at Tate Britain

Tate Britain – I’d forgotten just how incredible the original Tate is! Not just the collection, but the building itself. Thoroughly recommended and once again completely free of charge.

Dr. Johnson’s House – tucked away in the warren of alleys and courtyards behind Fleet Street is the former residence of Samuel Johnson, where he compiled the very first English Dictionary. Built in 1700 it’s been beautifully restored and is well worth a visit.

Dennis Severs' House

Dennis Severs’ House – for me this was the highlight of my London tourist time (it was also the most expensive at a whopping eight quid). Words can’t really describe what it’s like to step back into the sights, sounds and smells of 17th century London as you wander around the house, having just chased out the original occupants. Cups of tea are still steaming, freshly baked scones and cakes are still cooling and a glass of port has been spilled in the rush to get out.

Heritage Bus Routes – There are two bus routes in London that TfL still operates the old Routemaster buses on, route 9 (Kensington High Street – Trafalgar Square) and route 15 (Tower Hill – Trafalgar Square). Standard bus fares apply and there’s nothing better than jumping on an off a Routemaster’s open platform between stops or enjoying the view from the front seat of the top deck.

As I said before, my highlight was definitely Dennis Severs’ House, but it’s closely followed by the tour of the Spirit Collection and the Rothko room at Tate Modern. I will definitely go back to visit all of those again.

If you have any must sees yourself, feel free to add them in the comments.

Until now.

I’d seen many people reading their new Kindles on the tube, the size was right, the screen looked amazing and nobody seemed to be straining to hold the thing. On top of that, the price is right.

So I took the plunge and the moment it arrived, I knew I had made the right decision. It feels great, the screen is amazing, with excellent contrast and unlike most of the current crop of LCD screens, I can read the Kindle’s eInk display for days. Amazon have got it right, concentrating on producing a device that is brilliant for reading and not adding too many unnecessary frills.

Unfortunately, within hours of receiving it, my Kindle had developed a rattle. A quick scan of the intertubes revealed that this was a common problem, caused by a tiny screw coming loose and rattling around in the case.

I dreaded having to return the Kindle, not just because I loved it the second I unpacked it, but mainly because I was anticipating endless calls, trips to the post office and having to fork out for return postage. However, I was very pleasantly surprised with Amazon’s customer service.

The only slightly tricky thing about the entire experience was finding a number to call, but even that is now a lot simpler than it used to be. Once on the phone to customer service, they immediately acknowledged the problem and ordered a replacement for me. The phone call lasted less than five minutes.

Amazon then made me even happier with their actual returns procedure, which couldn’t have been any easier. They sent me an email with a link to print a returns label and a further link to the DHL website to book a date for the collection of the rattling Kindle. A date and time would have been even more amazing, but I guess that’s a limitation of DHL, not Amazon.

My new, non-rattling Kindle arrived two days later, as did the courier to collect the old one. All at no additional cost to me and with a minimum of inconvenience. All in all, I can’t fault Amazon’s customer service and the whole returns experience. Now if they would only sort out their somewhat antique website, but that’s another post for another time.

Oh and if you hadn’t guessed, I LOVE my Kindle.

Scenarios

As of version 6.0.65 of the Flash Player, it supports Adobe’s ExpressInstall technology, which makes the upgrade process almost seamless, so with that in mind, the site needs to support three scenarios:

1. The user does not have Flash installed
2. The user has the wrong version of Flash installed and the version is below 6.0.65
3. The user has the wrong version of Flash installed and the version is above 6.0.65

In all three scenarios, if the site uses a mixture of Flash and other content, Flash detection should only take place in one Flash piece, usually a core feature or message. Otherwise there is a risk that each piece of Flash content alerts the user to a possible version mismatch.

For scenario one, the messaging to ask users to install the Flash Player needs to be included in the non-Flash alternative content. This messaging needs to have the right balance between being noticeable and not being intrusive, since it should not distract from the static non-Flash content and the experience of the site. Ideally the message would be HTML text in a layer over the alternative non-Flash content and should provide the necessary links to the Adobe Flash Player download.

For scenario two, ‘ExpressInstall’ cannot be used, so the messaging in the non-Flash alternative content needs to tell users that they have the wrong version of Flash and point them to the Adobe site to manually download the Flash Player and then return to the original site to reload it after installation. Again, this messaging needs to have the right balance between being noticeable and not being intrusive.

For scenario three, ‘ExpressInstall’ will display a customised dialog box to the user, asking them if they wish to upgrade their Flash Player. If the user agrees to update the Player, ‘ExpressInstall’ downloads it, installs it and reloads the current webpage to show the Flash content. If the user declines, all Flash pieces will show static no-Flash content with an unobtrusive message asking them to upgrade manually. The site should also place a cookie on the user’s computer, so that the upgrade message is suppressed on encountering further Flash content. However, on the next visit to the site, the upgrade message box should once again be displayed.

Messaging

For scenario one, where the users do not have Flash Player installed at all the message displayed in the non-Flash alternative content should read something like: “We have not found the Adobe Flash Player required to view content on this site on your computer. Please visit www.adobe.com to download the free Flash Player now.”

For scenario two, where ExpressInstall is not available, the message should read: “We have not found the correct version of the Adobe Flash Player required to view the content on this site on your computer. Please visit www.adobe.com to download and upgrade the free Flash Player now.”

Finally, for scenario three the following message can be displayed in the customisable dialog box: “We have not found the correct version of the Adobe Flash Player required to view the content on this site on your computer. Would you like to upgrade to the latest version of the free Flash Player now?”

If there are any Flash experts out there, who do things differently, please do get in touch and help me correct these guidelines.

The Redux event was organised by Matthew Solle, Martin Belam and Tom Coombs, through the London IA network. It was hosted by Jason Mesut at The Team and sponsored by Zebra People, who provided drinks and pizza. I thought the evening was a huge success and it was wonderful to get inspired all over again by the presentations recapping the July UX London conference.

Thank you very much to all who attended and thank you also for the kind feedback on my presentation. Finally a big thanks to everyone involved in organising, hosting and sponsoring the Redux.

Dan Saffer London IA UX London Redux

Notes from day one

The silo-ing of customer experience is a legacy of org-chart mentalities. By engaging everyone from the CEO down in the design process, we become facilitators for a much more successful outcome. This kind of total collaboration doesn’t slow down the process, but it may be a hard slog to get everyone incolved. – Peter Merholz

There is nothing tangible about service, but the value of a service is in the experience. – Eric Reiss

Parti is a term taken from architecture and means the basic scheme or concept of an architectural design, the big idea. In the context of web design, the parti derives from all the data and metrics we collect ahead of designing the early concepts. Everything from usage metrics, customer feedback and corporate strategy to concept test results and market forces combines to form the parti. – Luke Wroblewski

Users experience products from the outside in, through the interface and physical form, so in other words, the interface becomes the product. While it may be easier to focus on form and technology, the best products are designed from the inside out, meaning everything flows from behaviour. To design from the inside out, use behaviour as a design strategy, making it the differentiator, rather than features. Stop looking for users’ goals and preferences and start looking at what they do and why. Look for motivations, expectations and actions. – Dan Saffer

Designs can’t intuit anything, people intuit things, calling a design ‘intuitive’ is a shortcut. In order to make something ‘intuitive’, we must reduce the gap between current knowledge, which the user brings with them to the design and target knowledge, which they need to have to complete their task. Design happens in the gap between current and target knowledge and when the two meet, a design becomes ‘intuitive’. Field studies help us to find out more about current knowledge and usability studies can help us determine target knowledge. Both should be used to to create ‘intuitive’ designs. – Jared Spool

‘Decorating’ data, rather than using visual design to provide better access is dangerous. Find the story in the data, assign different visual cues to each dimension and remove anything that isn’t telling the story in order to visualise data successfully. – Jeffrey Veen

Whenever anyone says they want something, oppose it, question it. Life is complex and the tools we build have to match life, so the problem becomes one of understanding, not simplicity. Complexity is not bad, complicated is. In order to make something simple, you compensate by making other things complex. Complexity is good, it’s good to feel the world disappear as you engage in something you are doing. It’s enjoyable and productive. The reason the iPod is such a success is that it is a complex, but complete system, exposing only the parts of its complexity that a user needs at any given time. – Don Norman

Notes from day two workshops

Some new (to me) brainstorming ideas, including giving participants real incentives, like a ticket to a prize draw for every 10 ideas generated. Some interesting techniques include brainwriting, where each participant starts sketching an idea for three minutes, then passes it to their neighbour to continue until the sheet comes full circle back to the originator and using poetry to reduce the problem down to a haiku or bento, which apparently really focusses you in on the important parts of the problem. To further focus in on the problem, keep questioning the concept, swipe ideas from other fields or domains, move up or down levels of abstraction (called laddering) or pretend to make something completely opposite to what you are trying to design (bizarro world). Once all the outputs from the brainstorm have been clustered, use them to define design principles, which help pick the right concept, help make design decisions and help find the Buddha Nature of the product. Design principles should be short, memorable, cross-feature, specific (“Easy to use” is to broad) and non-conflicting. – Dan Saffer

Every link on a page gives of a scent that users follow, providing this scent gets stronger with each click, users will get increasingly confident that they are heading the right way and the number of clicks is irrelevant, i.e. the three click rule is “bullshit” (Jared’s words, not mine). Users don’t mind scrolling, providing the page doesn’t suffer from “Iceberg Syndrome”, i.e. users believe that the content below the fold is more of the same of what is above the fold. Other barriers to scrolling include horizontal rules, horizontal banners or banner sized white spaces and two column paragraphs that end at the same ‘height’. Users lose scent if they have to use the back button, which is “the button of doom” (Jared made us repeat this phrase several times), if they have to ‘pogo stick’ back and forth between gallery pages and content pages or if they have to use search. In fact by using search on a given page, users are telling us the target words they expect to find on that page. Breadcrumb trails act much like the back button and observation has shown that they are only used in ‘failure conditions’. Link order is important and in 99% of cases, alphabetical lists may as well be completely random. Finally, longer pages work better and pagination should be avoided where possible. – Jared Spool

Notes from day three workshops

‘Pencils Before Pixels’. Carry a sketchbook all the time (I once again do, after a hiatus of many, many years) and practice all the time. Be fast and loose, use icons, images and symbols and date your pages. Respect the borders, especially the gutters, print annotations neatly and remember that white space is ok. – Mark Baskinger & William Bardel

When putting together discussion guides for design research, start with a very broad question, then narrow down into specifics. The standard 45-60 minute interviews with 6-8 users plan works, but ensure that it is appropriate for the problem you are trying to understand. Bear in mind that the problem is not always what it first appears to be and define your research questions to provide the best answers. Research as close to the context of the problem as possible and don’t narrow in on the context too early. – Leisa Reichelt

What is a persona?

Most of us know that personas are fictional characters created to represent typical users of a website or product. The use of personas as a technique was popularised by Alan Cooper in his 1999 book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. Cooper’s original goals for personas were to allow the development team to live and breathe the user’s world and to allow the team to filter out personal quirks and focus on motivations and behaviours typical of a broad range of users, while still relating to users as individuals.

Personas are used to provide guidance on features, interactions, the complexity of those features and interactions and the visual design of the website or product. In order to achieve this, they should contain behaviour patterns of the target audience, their skills and attitudes, their environment and any other pertinent personal details. It is also useful for the personas to include goals and motivations for the use of the site or product, as well as some clue to their desires, both in relation to the site or product and life in general. It is also important to look at the personas limitations.

A typical persona might be put together on a single sheet of A4, usually containing the aspects mentioned above and usually accompanied with an image of the person being described. A memorable and slightly unusual name helps bring the persona to life and makes it easier to remember who they are throughout the design process.

Persona Overview Slide

How can we add more meaning?

The type of single page persona shown above certainly has its uses, but it can be limited by a lack of actionable data. To rectify this, George Olsen created his persona toolkit back in 2004.  The toolkit is effectively a spreadsheet that can be completed to provide biographic, geographic, demographic and psychographic background information. It explores a business’s relationship to the persona and the persona’s relationship to a product and business. It further specifies the persona’s specific goals, needs and attitudes, their specific knowledge and proficiencies, some context of usage, interaction, information, sensory and emotional aspects of the user experience. It also includes any accessibility issues and any relationships among personas. In other words, the toolkit can be used to provide a wealth of data to really bring a persona to life, although clearly that data needs to be sourced from somewhere in order to be used.

The data needed to produce a persona can come from a multitude of sources, including any market research or segmentation data that is readily available from the usual suppliers, such as Forrester, Cap Gemini, Mindshare, etc. Furthermore, interviews with a cross section of potential users or focus groups and workshops can provide the necessary background information.

Using the Olsen toolkit can be cumbersome due to the shear wealth of information that it can provide, so personally I like to distill this information back into a one page overview as shown above, safe in the knowledge that should I have a question that is not answered, I will most likely find the answer by going back to the toolkit.

When to use personas?

I agree with Jared Spool, in that I find personas to be generally useful, but more so in the following situations:

• When the design team is an actual team, with more than a single individual working the entire process from concepts through delivery
• When the team members are different from their users (which is most of the time)
• When the team members do not have constant direct interaction with the users
• And when different users will interact with the artifacts differently because they have different intentions, context, skills, knowledge or experience

What are the benefits of personas?

The single biggest benefit of personas is that they put a human face on otherwise abstract customer data and allow clients to sanity check the target audience we are designing for. This is the point that brings me to my epiphany about the usefulness of personas. We were creating a new corporate website for a bank and one of the members of the target audience was a student. The persona we designed was a typical laid back, even slightly lazy student, but on presenting this back to the client, we were informed that they did not recognise the person. All the students normally visiting their site for research are top performers, go-getters and in the top percentile of their classes. That single moment restored my faith in personas, since without them, we would have happily carried on making the wrong assumptions about the target audience.

Putting this human face on reams of customer date may also help designers infer what a real person might need, inference which in turn may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and features definition. Using an overview persona in conjunction with the Olsen toolkit means the personas are easy to communicate and allow visual designers, developers, and others to easily absorb the customer data.

Importantly, personas help the team have a shared understanding of the target audience in terms of their goals, capabilities and contexts. They can help prevent us from projecting our own mental models on the product design and they help us keep the focus on cases that are most likely to be encountered for the target users and not on edge cases.

What are some of the criticism of personas?

Perhaps the biggest criticism is that in practice, the utility of personas on teams varies from team to team. There is still widespread skepticism when it comes to using personas and while some development groups will accept them readily and find them useful, others will continue to be skeptical and make little use of them.

Unfortunately there is also still a lack of hard scientific data for the success of personas and very little research into the field exists to date. This lack of research makes it doubly difficult to ‘sell’ the benefits of personas to the skeptics and indeed to some clients.

Conclusions

It is my personal belief that personas are useful in many ways, not least as a sanity check of the target audience with project stakeholders. I think it is invaluable to have a constant reminder of who we are creating the product for and to continually remind ourselves who our users are. Yes, they may be ficticious and yes, they may rely on abstract consumer data, but their presence is nevertheless valuable.

The experience was an eye opener (forgive the pun). Working on my laptop without enabling any of the tools was virtually impossible. The drops resulted in a very small area of blurry focus in the very centre of my vision, so using the keyboard was a very hit and miss affair and pointing the mouse cursor at anything meaningful was equally random.

Just trying to access Apple’s Universal Access Tools preference panel was difficult and perhaps something I should have had ready before the drops were administered, but happily the copy in the preferences panels is large and bold making it just about readable. Unhappily, the radio buttons and slider controls are still standard size, so actually switching the options on and off or adjusting their parameters was very tricky.

On the first tab are the controls for Seeing. The zoom was very welcome since the large text was much easier to decipher, but the real relief came when I changed the display settings from Black on White to White on Black. With my pupils dilated, my eyes were very sensitive to light, so looking at light text on a dark background was much easier than the standard view. I did try the Voice Over utility, but it sounded like the voice of a developer describing the widgets that make up a dialog box, so I quickly abandoned it.

The second tab contains some basic controls for allowing users with impaired hearing to set the entire screen to flash if there are alert sounds and gives access to the standard sound settings preference panel. Luckily the pupil dilation drops did not affect my hearing, so I didn’t make use of this function.

The third tab contains the keyboard controls and since my current six and a half finger system isn’t touch typing and with the keyboard a blur, hitting the right keys was very difficult, I thought that they might provide me with tools to make my keyboard usage a little more accurate. Unfortunately, neither the Sticky Keys nor the Slow Keys features really helped.

Sticky keys makes modifier keys persist until the final key in the combination is pressed, for example when saving a document with Apple-S. Making the Apple key sticky means that users don’t have to hold it and the S key at the same time. This is clearly useful for anyone who does not have the dexterity required to do this, but did not help me identify which key I had pressed. My hopes were further dashed when the display pressed keys on screen option only showed the modifier keys on screen rather than repeating all keystrokes.

Slow keys didn’t really do much to improve my typing either. It is designed to alleviate the problems caused when pressing multiple keys at the same time, by introducing a delay before a key is accepted, thus allowing the user to correct any mistakes before a key is actually entered. Since I could feel my way around the keyboard, pressing multiple keys at the same time was not really an issue.

The final tab contains the settings for mouse and trackpad, including Mouse Keys, which replace the mouse controls with keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor. Given my troubles with the keyboard, this was quickly dismissed, but the ability to change the size of the cursor was very welcome and although I could still not type properly, I could now both read the screen and click in the right place.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised at the difference the Mac’s on board accessibility tools made to my experience. The standard settings did not allow me to read anything on screen or interact with it in a meaningful way. Once I had inverted the contrast, zoomed in and increased the size of the mouse pointer, I could once again read web pages and see toolbars and other navigation in applications.

I’m sure that touch typing would have solved some of my keyboard issues, but a utility to show a large display of all key presses on screen would still be very welcome. Zooming in to formfields or text input panels did help, but it is cumbersome. The Voice Over utility does have a function to read out each keypress, but without turning off the vast array of other options, it was very disruptive.

Admittedly it was only a very informal test to pass the time while the eye drops wore off, but it did give me some very valuable insights. While I’m not suggesting everyone should rush out to their opticians for pupil dilating eyedrops to run their own test session, I do believe that my first hand experience of trying to use a computer with a visual impairment for a few hours has been priceless.

So how can we ensure that the product is working, that it is in fact usable? The simple answer is to just ask some users. This may seem like a slightly flippant remark, but I believe it really can be that simple, especially during the early stages of the design process. There are many techniques for testing websites with users, ranging from very simple corridor or guerrilla testing, to full on usability studies. Each one is appropriate in certain situations, but not in others.

I believe some level of user input is essential during all stages of the design process. After all, most of us follow same variation of a user centered process, so rather than second guessing the users, let’s get them involved. It doesn’t have to be particularly formal or expensive. Just some simple qualitative feedback can be enough to make a real difference. It could be as simple as asking  a colleague for their opinion on a wireframe or an early concept sketch. More feedback could be obtained by building a simple prototype and asking people to click through it. Again, this does not have to be a full blown usability study, a small group of people will be enough to get valuable opinions.

A more formal technique for user input is a card sorting exercise, which is usually designed to create a taxonomy for content on a website and by extension a navigation schema. Again, there are a variety of approaches, depending on whether a taxonomy exists already or not. If there is a current taxonomy, a reverse card sort or navigation test will deliver valuable insights into the validity of the taxonomy and whether it is still suitable. This could be performed on a prototype of the navigation or on a simple paper prototype, which could take the form of index cards labelled with the taxonomy items, which the test candidate is then asked to ‘navigate’ through. If no taxonomy exists, a closed card sort can quickly reveal how users would group content items into predetermined groups. An open card sort allows the user to determine the group headings, but this may be problematic during the early stages of the design process.

The benefits of testing early on should be clear, the more we involve users, the more likely we are to address their needs and concerns early on in the process, thus laying stable foundations for the remainder of the project. That said, there is no substitute for more testing later on. As the visual design starts to mature and the first components are developed, it should be straightforward to build accurate visual prototypes. These can be a simple as static images with clickable hotspots produced in, dare I say it, Powerpoint or they can be more involved Flash or HTML prototypes. As with all testing, simple qualitative feedback is more valuable than not testing at all, so again, simple corridor tests are better than second guessing.

Ideally, a formal usability study of the finished product should be undertaken before launch, but it tends to be one of the first things to get cut from the timelines as they approach crunch time. That is another matter for another post though…