Yesterday we got an excellent overview from one of our colleagues on Usability.

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He is an Usability Expert – i.e. he doesn’t just organises and manages Usability Testing, but also does a whole lot of other stuff that is required to get it correct.

Just to mention it briefly:

• it requires quite a bit of research to start with; based on your application, userbase, etc
• Organisational Objectives
• Business Objectives
• User Objectives
• identifying personas, as in what different types of users are expected to use the system
• preparing wireframes
• templates
• and then a whole raft of things to organise some user testing, like, identifying test subjects, organising questionairre for them, petrol vouchers, food, compensation, post-testing questionairre and most importantly a test lab.

…Phew!!!

Overall it was a great session. Quite insightful and gave us some food for thought. Hopefully he will also be trying to setup a framework, so that we can work within it.

In the meantime enjoy this post On Usability by Ben and if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions then feel free to feed them through to us using the comments box below.