Investing in Usability: Testing versus Training
Boxes and Arrows — “Assume that you are in charge of a development project and you have about $10,000 to spend on usability. What would you do? What is the best way to use the money? What will make the project a success? What is the right thing to do for the organization? What will be best for customers?”
This is an article I wrote in light of my personal experience and some discussions with usability specialists, developers, and project managers. I cover a lot of ground and I strongly encourage you to read the article if you are thinking about how to allocate your usability budget. The bottom line is that usability training can be a much better investment than usability testing. I even provide you with specific advice on how to choose between testing and training. Enjoy!
January 26th, 2005 at 8:35 pm
Interesting article and I agree with you that training is an important part of making designers more aware of what they design en for whom but…
I still think that Usability Experts and tests are important for several reasons.
The first is that someone has to be responsible for the usability in a project. If there isn’t a usability representitive than there’s a big chance that some heuristic problems are overlooked. I’ve seen many designers and even myself as a usability expert overlooking the usability of my own designs and websites because of my tunnelvision towards the end of the project.
I’m not saying that real usability experts have to be brought into projects. No, it’s just that someone (with a prefered usability eye) has to be responsible guarding the usability and be seperated from the design and development sections.
The second reason and also related to the first is that someone also being a designer often becomes ‘in love’ with his or her design. As usability experts are familiar with this fenominon, it often leads to blindness towards usability problems. And altough I can teach someone to be critical towards his or her own design I’ve found that often this is very hard. Also… working on the same design day in day out makes one pretty blind towards usability aspects of that design.
Peter Blansjaar (The Netherlands)
Usability Expert
peter@blansjaar.com
(I excuse for any language and writing mistakes)