dawn marie — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:38:31 GMT

If I had $10,000 I would keep usability fully in the project.Don’t succumb to “either/or” statements, but how can we get user input AND remain cost effective.

You see, you can have testing early and cheap. Use paper prototyping ahead of development for testing. Walk down the hallway of your building and ask people to walk through the pencil sketch, wireframe or mockup. Ask questions like, “what would you do first if you needed to enter your expense report, what stands out first”, etc. Granted this is very informal, but you can gain an understanding of the UI by asking 15 people – 5 minutes a piece. If my dev team needs an answer today, I can get very close to accurate in 75 minutes.

Also, I use UT to show our success rates for CBA – not only for enhancements for the next release, etc. I am aware the user groups may not be involved, but the intuitiveness of the product can be achieved in this manner.

Lastly, training over testing can be very expensive. Our accounting company is one of the largest in the nation/world with mulitple offices in every state of the nation and abroad. We have a large amount of new hires who are here seasonally – just out of college for their first big job. Can you imagine the training dollars? In this case, it would be well over $10,000.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by dawn marie