E-Commerce Lecture 6

Diss My Web Site, Please

Jakob Nielsen is feeling anxious. He sips a soda and paces like an expectant father. A series of ''users,'' as he likes to call them, soon will troop into the room next to the one where we are waiting here in a Seattle testing lab, visible to us through one-way mirrored glass. Click here to see the rest of the article.

Notes from The Lesson Plan

The learning objectives of lesson 2 include:

In this lecture, we will examine these two important aspects.

The key principle for maximizing usability is to employ iterative design, which progressively refines the design through evaluation from the early stages of design. The evaluation steps enable the designers and developers to incorporate user and client feedback until the system reaches an acceptable level of usability.

The preferred method for ensuring usability is to test actual users on a working system. Achieving a high level of usability requires focusing design efforts on the intended end-user of the system. There are many ways to determine who the primary users are, how they work, and what tasks they must accomplish. However, clients' schedules and budgets can sometimes prevent this ideal approach. Some alternative methods include user testing on system prototypes, a usability inspection conducted by experts, and cognitive modeling.

But ultimately, the way to get user data boils down to the basic rules of usability:

Say, for example, that 50% of survey respondents claim they would buy more from e-commerce sites that offer 3D product views. Does this mean you should rush to implement 3D on your site? No. It means that 3D sounds cool. The world is littered with failed businesses that banked on people's attitude toward hypothetical products and services. In speculative surveys, people are simply guessing how they might act or which features they'll like; it doesn't meant they'll actually use or like them in real life.

Heuristic Evaluation (originally proposed by Nielsen and Molich, 1990) is a discount method for quick, cheap, and easy evaluation of the user interface.

The process requires that a small set of testers (or "evaluators") examine the interface, and judge its compliance with recognised usability principles (the "heuristics"). The goal is the identification of any usability issues so that they can be addressed as part of an iterative design process.

Heuristic Evaluation is popular in Web development circles because it requires few resources in terms of money, time or expertise. So any developer can enjoy the benefits of usability testing - not just those with thousands to spend on a professional assessment.