My New Year’s resolution: paying attention to users

Boing Boing posted a great write-up about Meetup.com’s user testing process. It’s always great to see this done in practice the right way. They make the process very lightweight and agile. It’s not a huge project, but it is something that they do every day. Just the right amount of discipline to make a difference.

I am a huge advocate of usability testing and how it makes your website suck less. Everything that we throw up there is a guess. Sure, some web analytics analysis can help us see how we’re pushing users through our sites. But we don’t truly know the “why” of it all until we see and hear it from a person right in front of us.

And I have resolved that I need to get my stuff in front of a set of real users at least once a month. I’ll be buying a license of Silverback (it’s cheap!) and figuring out how to recruit the types of people that I need to improve my sites.

Technorati Tags: boing boing, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, hci, human factors, meetup, usability, usability testing, user experience, ux, ux design

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