Who You Calling A Jesse?

Recently in discussions about the location and function of parts of a web site design, I came up against some ‘usability’ research based opinion. Which is good. Why? It means people care enough to look at how people use their site. But what made be a little hesitant to take the information as relevant to this particular design was that the study was based on a totally different design and content layout. The information is only literally relevant to that particular site. It doesn’t mean it is not useful information mind you.

All the effort that went into testing that site and the specific information is not entirely useful once you change the content or tweak some navigation or change the design or any change really. The general rules established by watching your users are useful, however, but do people focus too much on the specifics in the testing results?

The question of where to invest time and money when you have neither is really important. A very useful article entitled Testing versus Training might help you decide if you are better off training your group in general usability concepts or spending the time testing or both. I lean towards learning the concepts, checking out the excellent resources all over the net, and if you have time doing some quick and dirty testing to see how users view your site.

If you dig through my design and link collection categories you might find some useful stuff. In the area of usability, this site needs some work ;) Planning on doing that soon.