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Staying Connected: Chris Jasek of Elsevier’s User Centered Design Group answers your usability questions

Chris Jasek of Elsevier’s User Centered Design Group answers your usability questions

Q: What are some tips for planning usability activities so they are most effective?

A: Typically usability activities occur much later than they should, so it is very important to gain buy-in and plan them in advance.

Many teams view usability as a postlaunch activity to evaluate a live website. This is the typical view of an organization that is in the initial stages of Jakob Nielsen's Corporate Usability Maturity model. More mature organizations realize the value of usability as an up-front activity that identifies user-driven changes and saves development and maintenance costs. Studies show that every $1 invested in usability returns $2 to $100 (Pressman, 1992).

Usability activities can be done simply and on a very small budget.

So the key words in planning usability are early and often.

Here are some useful tips:

• Strive to get all usability activities into the project plan and agreed to by the project owner
• Ensure user testing and analysis of the results occur early in the project before requirements are written
• Ensure user testing continues in several more iterations throughout the project
• Focus on doing less with more frequency
• Don't spend time writing lengthy reports, but quickly extract useful results and move on

Usability activities can be done simply and on a very small budget, and they don't typically add much time to a project as long as they are planned for in advance. If you’re not able to do as much as you like, remember that doing some usability activity however small is better than doing nothing.

c.jasek@elsevier.com
www.elsevier.com/librarians/AskUCD