Usability testing doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be time consuming. The most important thing is to actually do usability testing, and of course to respond appropriately to the feedback from the test.

Studies show that you really don’t need more than five people in a study. If all you can get is ONE person, that’s better still than not having any. However, having 3 to 5 people who have not been involved with your project, test your website’s usability, will yield really solid results.

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I’ve been designing and creating websites for as long as there’s been a World Wide Web. My first efforts were pretty typical, too - long scrolling pages, lots of “back to top” links and such. Basically, really awful websites. I learned though, from watching people interact with either sites I’ve created, or others. I learned a great deal more when I was teaching web development. Oh my, the things we assume. (We being me in this case.)

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While most would say this is a good problem to have, I have had more work in the past month than I can shake a stick. So much so, I’m saying no to more potential jobs than usual. The Design Mission routinely says no to a few potential jobs each week simply because it’s not a good match given our availability, the scope of work, etc. Our best clients are ones that recognize our lack of availability during normal business hours and who prefer email to phone calls like we do. That can be a limiting factor, obviously.

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It’s been a month now that I have been using a Palm Pilot instead of my very trusty DayTimer, traditional notebook setup and I have to say, I’m hooked. While at times the lifelong habit of taking notes with pen and paper is still something my hand and mind want to do, the switch to a completely digital world has been a good one.

I have been using a program called Bonsai to tack projects and to-dos. It is fast, simple to use and nicely designed. But it didn’t do enough for me. It was a good introduction to the Palm path however and I don’t regret starting with it. Now I’m using a product from CodeJedi called Shadow. (’Your shadow follows you everywhere you go…’) It’s much more complex, but also much more useful to me.

Now, I can create outlines of my project tasks and processes and associate Palm tasks and notes with each line item. It even automates many of these features. Better still, there are both Mac OS X and PC desktop apps that work nicely with the files. (The Mac version being I think superior to the PC in design, too.) Given I work on both environments, that’s a real plus.

My former boss sent me a link to this site today —
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html

Having given my boss a copy of one of Guy’s books - Rules for Revolutionaries - I was of course immediately sucked into his blog, too. What a great mind! Guy Kawasaki gets it and says it right. He reminds me of Richard Feynman.

A very cool entry above — will need to look at some of the others more carefully, too.