The last time that I had a lot of customer feedback on an application’s usability was my first job where I was both a developer and the tech support for a small in-house application. Since then, I’ve worked on larger applications and I’ve never had the opportunity to watch real users actually try and use the software that I worked on.
With www.MapKat.com , we decided to run at least a couple of usability studies. Never having run a formal usability study, I started by reading the book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. This was a very quick read that discusses usability and web site design in general. The book also has a couple of chapters specifically on running usability studies. Based on the book, we came up with an interview script for our usability study and bought “Camtasia Studio” (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp) which is an awesome screen recorder software package. We then went to friends and family whom we thought matched our target market and asked for a bit of their time (we tried to stay away from software developers).
I cannot over state what a positive experience these usability tests have been. I’d recommend that all developers endeavour to participate in usability studies for the software that they’ve work on. It’s an incredibly humbling experience to see a user fumble through the UI on a feature that you worked hard to make as intuitive as possible.
With each round of usability, we created a list of problems that we saw users having. We then created a prioritized list of UI changes that we wanted to make. Some of these changes were as small as adding a tool-tip or changing the text on a button. Other changes were a more substantial rework of a major feature. It was very satisfying to see that our changes made after the first round of usability made a significant improvement to usability in the second round.
Going forward, we will continue to do usability studies with each new feature that we add to the website. The feedback we get is just too valuable for the small time investment it takes to run a usability study. Please go and give MapKat.com a try and let us know your thoughts on its usability.
