Book of the Week: Rocket Surgery Made Easy

17 Jul 2016

rocket_surgery_made_easy This week, I read Rocket Surgery Made Easy, because I want to go to Mars like Elon Musk. Steve Krug is better known for Don’t Make Me Think, a book about usability of websites. If you’re someone reading this book, it usually means you don’t do any usability testing, so it all rides on you to start doing it. Usability Test But I have web analytics, why do I actually need to talk to people? Doesn’t my web analytics tell me what people are doing on my site already? Aside from most web analytics being difficult to use, they only tell you what happened and not why. The why is what is important. A lot of time on a page is usually good unless they spent time on that page, because they were confused. Facilitator

Anyone who doesn’t really like people—the office curmudgeon, for instance—is probably a poor choice. Also people who don’t listen well, people who tend to be impatient, and people who like to force their ideas on others.

In other words, I should be not a facilitator. I can’t help it if my ideas are better than your ideas. The facilitator is both the tour guide and the therapist. You need to be able to get participants to verbalize what they are thinking and guide them through the tasks they need to do in a timely manner while keeping them happy. Test Session A good amount of testing is 3 people in the morning, every month. Then a lunch debrief.

The Welcome should be scripted and take care of any business/legal issues. The Questions are designed as a warm up to get the participants comfortable talking and to get some baseline information. Whenever I’ve been on camera, the cameraman would always try to ask me repeated questions to warm me up. Fluffer questions are important, don’t skip them. You want to know what people are thinking. Keep them on the home page at first and ask them to tell you what they think what the site is. After that it is time to get to the meat and give the participants tasks to complete as part of a scenario. The scenario gives the context. You want to see where people encounter problems along the way. Observers should be in a different room than the facilitator and test subject. You want to recruit as many observers as possible to get buy-in from people and show them the usefulness of usability testing. At the end of a debriefing, you should have a list of the most serious usability problems and a list of the problems that will be fixed before the next round of usability testing. Tweaking > Redesign In Krug’s experience, you want to do the least you can do to solve a problem, so tweaking is much preferred over a redesign. Taking something away is also much preferred to tweaking.

  1. Tweak cost less
  2. Tweaks require less work.
  3. Tweaks don’t ruin lives, break up families or wreck careers
  4. Small changes can be made sooner.
  5. Small changes are more likely to actually happen.
  6. If you make larger changes, you’re more likely to break other things that are working fine in the process.
  7. Most people don’t like change, so a redesign annoys them.
  8. A redesign means making a lot of changes at once, with the attendant complexities and risks.
  9. A redesign means involving a lot of people in a lot of meetings. Enough said.

A morning a month and you’re site will be more usable. Easy. Purchase Rocket Surgery Made Easy on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.