Unit 5 Reading

Chapter 8 and 9

In a regular Web team, there are different ideas, opinions and perspective from different team positions. So, it’s hard to have a right answer on an objective discussion. Such as CEO want the Website larger and clearer, or the designer want it to be more beautiful and understandable for users, or the developers want it more simple and elegant with cool built-in features. Besides, they state that the design have to depend on user experience based on the user average usability analysis. But if they keep arguing their own opinions on a site element, they will never get a “right” final answer. Because” the Web users are unique, and all Web use is basically idiosyncratic.” There are amount of people like this feature, the rest does not like this feature, so when design Web, the team need to design for the larger percent of particular users but still have all web feature that do-not-like-user can use it. And also, design what we think like what Web users thinking. This will limit the designing possibilities and also the fence that block the ideas and developments for the website. So, before launching a final Website, we need some usability testing that can help fixing some mistakes and some most useful features.

Usability testing is really needed before we put it on the live internet environment. It should be test in the early of the designing process, not just at the end of the process. Because, before to do a test, the chosen testing users is random people, not specific or focus group that concern to the website’s business and even no matter how many people in the test, but at least one. The users will be asked to take a look some competitive websites which are “live”, so that they will have better critiques when they already see the planning website. The usability testing is related to psychology so much because it collects people’s thinking, ideas, and opinions. And also, they will change their behaviors in a test if they know there are someone or something watching them. They will get pressure to take out a good critique. Besides, with a low budget website plan, we can try to test with less people than the high budget one. But, the result will be better if we conduct a testing in two rounds, the first round is finding out the most basic problem and then fix them; the next round is to figure out the potential problems after the first round fixing. The result after the test is less-people testing will find more problems than a group of eight testing users.Be careful with obscuring problems, if it is really obscuring or misunderstand web user, just remove it, don’t add more feature on it to get the muddling.

Link to reference:
Web site usability testing: recommended procedures
Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
The Science of Web Design and Website Usability
http://www.usertesting.com/