Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

Get your boss (and her boss) to watch a usability test.
The tactic
that I think works best is getting people from higher up the food chain
to come and observe even one usability test. Tell them that you’re
going to be doing some testing and it would be great for the Web
team’s morale if they could just poke their head in for a few minutes.
In my experience, executives often become fascinated and stay longer
than they’d planned, because it’s the first time they’ve seen anyone try
to use the company’s site and it’s often not nearly as pretty a picture as
they’d imagined.
It’s important to get them to come in person. The difference between
watching a usability test live and hearing a presentation about it is like
the difference between watching a sporting event while it’s happening
versus listening to a recap of it on the evening news. Live games create
memorable experiences; the evening news not so much.
If you can’t get them to come, then settle for second best: include clips
of highlights from tests in your presentations. If you don’t get to do a
presentation, post a short clip (less than 3 minutes) on your intranet

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and send out email with an intriguing description and a link to the
video. Even executives like watching short videos.
Do the first one on your own time.
When you do your first test, don’t
ask for permission; just keep it incredibly simple and informal, and
find volunteers for participants so it doesn’t cost anything.
And try to make sure that something improves as a result. Pick an easy
target to test—something that you know has at least one serious
usability problem that can be fixed quickly without having to get a lot
of people to sign off on the change—renaming a poorly labeled button,
for instance. Then test it, fix it, and publicize it.
If you can find a simple way to measure the improvement, do so. For
instance, you might test something that’s been causing a lot of support
calls and then show how much the calls on that issue decreased after
you fixed the problem.