Giving up on usability testing

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We can’t stress enough the importance of knowing your end-users. A lot of techniques are available (card sorting, interviews, surveys, shadowing, usability tests, etc) to do this.Yesterday, I received an email from a big French Web service. The following excerpt explains the creation of a FAQ to help users understand the navigation. The button to access the section was even in attachment…

“En vue de faciliter votre navigation dans [service name], nous avons créé unefoire aux questions (FAQ) accessible par le bouton représentant le pointd’interrogation (exemple ci-joint). Nous avons répertorié des réponsesaux questions les plus souvent demandées.”

Here, the time invested writing documentation on how the design works would have been better served conducting usability tests. After all, the user is generally alone in front of the computer; if a design needs explaining, it means that it’s probably not working… Give us a call before giving up.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Usability Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.