The type of report can vary, but there is an issue of tracking
usability problems.  When you do a study or review, the product team
will likely only fix a minority of problems and some problems may be
deeply rooted in the Web or GUI architecture and you will have to
decide whether to patch (temporary improvement) or revise the
architecture significantly.  Given that you may need to track problems
that aren't fixed for multiple versions of your product or service,
there should be some type of long-term tracking system which could
(should?) be the overall bug/defect tracking system. Ignoring the
debate about what a "usability bug" is, many usability bugs cannot be
fixed in the short term.  Another issue of "reporting and tracking" is
that you may find meta-issues that do not emerge fully in any single
evaluation but do show up across methods and groups. Putting reports
online is not, I believe, a very effective way to track problems -- a
usability database of some type is required.  with a database, you
could extract problems by their location in the product, frequency,
user group, method (survey, lab test, field interviews, support calls)
and triangulate.  So one thought is to have a short report as a
deliverable, a database where you can create ad hoc reports over time
and method and other variables, and a walkthrough with the product
team so they understand better the issues and learn for the next
update.

Chauncey



On Nov 16, 2007 6:59 AM, Marianne Jensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm curious to know what other usability specialists are including/excluding
> in their usability reports. I'm finding that it largely depends on the
> client, as well as budget of course. The more liberal the budget, the more
> likely it is that we have time to go through and design suggested
> alternatives to problematic flows, pages and/or overall site structure. It
> is often the case however, that budgets for usability reviews are relatively
> small, in which case we're limited to a comb through of the site, screen
> shots to highlight problems areas, and written recommendations for
> improvement.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Med venlig hilsen
>
> Marianne Jensen
> Senior Interaction Designer
> ________________________________________________________________
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