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So, You Need a Book about Usability
A while back, I asked Karen Bachmann, a usability expert in our STC chapter, to recommend some books for our tech comm department. I was looking for a place to start with the topic. Without hesitation, she told me everyone should read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.
So, I ordered both Krug’s books: Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy. Rocket Surgery is an expansion on his explanation of how to do simple, cheap usability testing. It comes with great check lists and sample scripts that you can download, along with a free chapter of the book and recommendations on equipment.
Once I had read Don’t Make Me Think, I wanted to send recommendations to our developers. That seemed like an overwhelming undertaking, so instead, after reading Rocket Surgery, I decided to implement a testing schedule for our documentation, with the long-term goal of getting to test our products.
The books are light-hearted reads that make usability seem like common sense that everyone will value if you can just get them to a testing session. And I wanted a project like that. One with value that would be immediately apparent to anyone who dropped by to observe the testing. One that wouldn’t rely on my qualities to succeed, but that could sell itself.
The book was filled with step-by-step instructions for the various phases of testing: recruiting participants, writing the testing scenarios, leading the discussion afterward. Simple. The way I explained it to my manager sounded so simple, too. She approved the project.
Rocket Surgery by Proxy
Ultimately, the testing sessions we implemented differed in some fundamental ways from the process that Krug outlines. This was partly because we were testing proxy users—co-workers who have the domain expertise of our customers. The other variable is that, rather than websites, we were testing complex, highly-customizable products. This issue of testing on co-workers was the biggest challenge to adapting Krug’s method.
Our company builds software to be used by mainly by medical personnel in clinical settings. Many of our product specialists and technical support specialists come from that background.
This was important because we would not be recruiting for participants among our external users. We’d only recently started directly contacting clients. Trying out a new testing process on them was too far outside our comfort zone.
I took an excellent short story class in college towards my Creative Writing degree, and most of the class periods involved intense workshopping of our stories. The problem was, the second time we looked at a story, it was sometimes difficult for us to appreciate the revisions because we compared it to the previous version.
We couldn’t un-know the plot twists, and so we had an insider’s view, even if the twists were better executed in the second draft. The professor called it “pregnant with knowledge.”
Our proxy users, our testing participants, had insider knowledge of the products and sometimes even the documentation. They knew workarounds to find information that real customers may or may not know.
Many times, a participant would make an observation about a frustrating experience, “I wish I could sort here,” but then follow it with either the reason why the improvement hadn’t been implemented yet, “but we did this because we already had it that way in Product X,” or a detailed recommendation on how to fix it, “I was talking with Sue about how we should sort on this page and then filter by release date on the following page.”
My attempts to improvise and make the most of these insights led me off the scripts that Krug provides. I customized the script to fit our situation, as it was. I don’t think these variations produced bad results. It just complicated things. To compensate, I would recommend allotting ample time for creating the testing scenarios.
Kristi Leach is technical writer, content strategist, and recent transplant to the Chicago area. You can read the second part of this post on her blog, Release Notes.
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