[IxDA Discuss] Value of utesting a client driven marketing site.

[Adrian Chong]

Thanks for the response. That's probably the more accurate issue,
there is no measure of sucess for the site. If the stakeholders thinks
it's "cool" then it's a success for a while until they realize they
spent 500k on something that just looks neat but serves an ambiguous
purpose. Isn't that the nature of marketing though? Unfortunately, I
don't think I can really change a culture as one man :/

I guess I mentioned Usability testing as an issue because I use to do
a wide range of UX duties and now I'm responsible for a very narrow
process that seems to be missing the greater context that usually
informs my work.



On 9/17/06, Jared M. Spool <jspool at uie.com> wrote:
> At 02:24 PM 9/15/2006, Adrian Chong wrote:
> >In this circumstance, is it worthwhile to conduct usability testing?
> >There is no real data to tie the website to direct sales as the
> >product's main sale channel exists in brick and mortar stores. The
> >objective is general awareness for feature sets of the product and
> >it's superiority over previous iterations. We could potentially test
> >how much information is retained or if users can access that
> >information easily but is their value in doing this?
> Adrian,
>
> Usability testing is a tool. It tells you information about how people
> interact with the design. If there is information you'd like to learn about
> how people interact with your site, then it's a valuable tool.
>
> That said, I think the bigger concern is that you don't have any measures
> of success. If the site went away tomorrow, would anybody in your
> organization notice? Would it be reflected anywhere in the bottom line?
>
> Before I'd spend a lot of time designing usability tests, I'd think about
> how you'll know if the site is actually helping the organization or not. My
> guess is, once you have an understanding of the site's value, you'll have
> no trouble seeing how testing could help you refine and improve that value.
>
> Jared
>
>
> Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
> 510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
> 978 327-5561   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
> Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks
>
>
>


-- 
Adrian Chong
www.adrianchong.com/blog