(Excerpted from my forthcoming book “Writing Effective
Online Content Project Specifications”)
We rarely think of doing usability testing for online help
or documentation (online content) because, after all, it’s just text. In fact, online
content is text, but software forms a big part of it in the navigation, retrievability,
and other features. And like any software, it should be reviewed for usability.
What if no group in your company does formal usability
testing? Can you do it yourself without spending a lot of money? Yes. The results
won’t be statistically significant but they will be useful and inexpensive. How to do this? In brief…
·
Create
a prototype of your online content project. It can be a small but fully
functional online output or a paper prototype. (If you’re not familiar with
paper prototyping, see Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine
User Interfaces
by Carolyn Snyder, published in 2003 and available on Amazon. The book is an
excellent introduction to the subject, with additional points on usability in
general.)
·
Create several little scenarios
with questions whose answers can be found in the prototype. For example, “How many types of fixed asset
depreciation are there?” or “What is the specific gravity of tungsten?”
·
Find a small but representative group
of test subjects.
If you’re testing a product for a general audience, you might set up your test
in a conference room and invite people in at random to be test subjects. If
your company runs a user conference, that’s also a good place to find subjects.
·
Tell the subjects that you need
just fifteen minutes of their time. Offer a small gift (sometimes called swag or “tchotchkes”)
as an inducement for them to help. (No pens or coffee cups – both badly overused.)
For more impact, tell the subjects you’ll enter them in a raffle for dinner for
two at a local restaurant.
·
Give the subjects the scenarios
and ask them to find the answers. Watch them but don’t say anything or offer any
help. You can tell them to follow the so-called “speak aloud protocol” where
they’re free to say what they’re thinking. This may be a bit uncomfortable to
hear but it’s the feedback that you want.
The object is to see if the subjects can navigate through the online content to find
the answers to the questions posed in the scenarios and how difficult and
frustrating the process was. The results won’t be statistically significant,
but may well be very enlightening. That’s what you want.
