Hi Oleh, First up I have to come clean and say I've never been a fan of usability testing as for existing sites you should know already why the site is faiiing. I've worked with third party usability test results and 9/10 the user comments are often interesting but the conclusions terrible.
In short I don't feel there's any need for usability testing anyway when there are much better user research techniques such as using multiple competitor sites with users to give you an idea of what they're realy after and good old fashioned talking to people away from their computer one and one to get an idea of what they're after. If you are going to test then test prototypes but then only in context (context is king). That off my chest by the sounds of it they're doing what I have known as A/B testing - which has been used for advertising for quite a few years now, except they're changing items on a site. I personally did a stint working on a small .com site and found that a lot can be learnt from making small changes and keeping an eye on the web stats. I could see how many people where on the site and each day have a look at the figures to see where people where going on the site (all using free software). I went on to work for large companies that got web stats about once a month and hadn't really set up their four figure software to give then anything useful. It looks like someone is just trying to give a solution for these dysfunctional organsiations (that's most large organisations) that have too many barriers between decision makers and the raw information about who is visiting their sit and what they're doing whilst they're there. Personally I'm happy for 'usability testing' to die out and be replaced by user research and this approach, which can be done without the software, sounds like a good technique. It fits into the whole idea of 'put it live and see what happens' which can ofter bring you results quicker and better than getting 10 folks in a room with a half silvered mirror and expecting them to tell you how to redesign your site. -- Stewart Dean ________________________________________________________________ *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
