Here is a great story about one of the earliest Usability tests on the Macintosh.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Do_It.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=high It is a very short story and worth knowing about if you never heard it before. But the conclusions drawn from this test could have never be drawn from analysis of user behavior. It was drawn based on the facilitator making an observation and then questioning the user. Nick Iozzo Principal User Experience Architect tandemseven 847.452.7442 mobile [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.tandemseven.com/ From: Oleh Kovalchuke Sent: Sun 12/30/2007 11:45 PM To: IxDA Discuss Subject: [IxDA Discuss] The death of web usability testing as we know it? I was reading Supercrunchers [1], and came across Omniture's Offermatica [2]. Offermatica does real time randomization and analysis of traffic from the variants of the page. The randomization is important here for validity of the results. The analysis is per session. For instance, you want to see, how search box placement or font size affects product sales. Make the layouts to be tested and see, which one increases sales in real time. I think this could lead to an incremental microevolution of layouts, not unlike the biological microevolution (and look what good that has done...). So the questions I have are these: - Have people used Offermatica? - Since it brings actual statistical analysis into usability testing based on sales goals, doesn't it lead to the death (or at least to the significant dent) of the conventional web usability testing (facilitator, one-on-one etc.)? Put "something" on the web and start incrementing on daily basis. Oleh PS I understand that my message sounds like astroturfing. It is not. I am only concerned about Nielsen's welfare. ------------------ [1] http://tinyurl.com/2nzrov [2] http://www.omniture.com/products/optimization/offermatica - they use rather long copy as well as tiny font on that page, I wonder, if those were optimized with their software. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
