Usability Testing a must?
Usability testing can play a big role in providing applications/products that a user can work on without requiring any manuals (documentation) or training. It can help to identify inconsistencies within the system, measure the ease of learning provided by a system, measure response time when loading data on systems, study user patterns, and even locate bugs that may have been missed on previous testing done on system. All these can be achieved through observing users work on the product and identifying mistakes they make while working on the product or through documenting areas where users require assistance.
Usability testing is a good practice, but for a company, it may mean numerous changes on the product and hence, more time added in the hands of developers (not to mention cost to company). These changes on how a product works may mean rethinking the system design and maybe database changes, posing fear to IT managers in terms of budget and scope of the project. One may say, if you involve users throughout the development process, then these changes can be prevented from occuring, but it might be impossible to involve all your users on the development process (thus leaving room for usability issues being raised when other/new users come in touch with the product). Usability testing is a huge concern for projects, but is often neglected... Until we find a way to make it a 'must do' for products, it will always be an issue that is ignored by development teams.
For more on usability testing, you might want to read this book: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, by Joseph S Dumas, Janice C. Redish
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Schalk Neethling replied on Wed, 2008/03/19 - 8:30am
I hear what you are saying Langavi but, that is exactly the problem, usability is left untill the end or somewhere in the middle of a projects lifecycle. By this time it is often to late, or business feels it to be a uneeded expense, to make the changes required to make a product meet usability standards.
The whole idea behind the commnities and developers/educators applying and teaching these standards, accessibility and usability guidelines is to change the mindset of developers and business so that these areas are as much apart of product design as the use cases, database design and best practices used while writing enterprise code. If this becomes part of this design and planning process, you will find that the changes required later when user testing starts will be small manageable changes such as those bug fixes experienced by the enterprise developers.