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Even if you disagree on the exact number of people you need to test with, the key point here is that you don't need to have access to an expensive usability lab

Even if you disagree on the exact number of people you need to test with, the key point here is that you don't need to have access to an expensive usability lab to get good feedback on your product. Just looking over someone's shoulder as they fumble their way through the interface you designed can be a huge eye opener. My partners and I have been building a family intranet service (Kinverge.com). As soon as we had a working prototype together, we each sat down with various members of our family and asked them to perform several tasks on the site (register, invite others, add photos, post a message, etc.) After the initial instructions, we kept our mouths shut and simply took notes. And this is important -- don't jump in and try to help when the tester gets confused or lost. Seeing the actions users make when they're lost is just as important as seeing how they got lost in the first place. The notes we gathered during these sessions later helped us decide what changes to make to the site and in what priority.

lux 18y ago
We've found a brief interview where you can ask what they thought of certain things was very helpful afterwards too. We also do usability on the cheap, using ScreenFlow (varasoftware.com) which is only $99 compared to $1500 or so for Morae, which seemed to be the industry leader in usability testing. I think the analytics side, which was the big difference, is overrated and unnecessary. We're planning on writing to the ScreenFlow folks to show them the results of our tests, since they didn't seem to know of any users using it for this yet and it could be a good secondary market for them to get into... I'm also curious about Silverback (silverbackapp.com) but wasn't able to get into an early beta spot in time for our testing. It actually looks really similar to ScreenFlow in any case.
- metajack 18y ago
  I wanted to write an app to do usability testing for a while, and then screenflow came out and my first thought was "This is exactly what I wanted, and even better to boot." I have a hard time believing no one else is using it for this. I'm glad it's working out well for you. We'll be starting to use it for this in the near future.

lux 18y ago

We've found a brief interview where you can ask what they thought of certain things was very helpful afterwards too. We also do usability on the cheap, using ScreenFlow (varasoftware.com) which is only $99 compared to $1500 or so for Morae, which seemed to be the industry leader in usability testing. I think the analytics side, which was the big difference, is overrated and unnecessary. We're planning on writing to the ScreenFlow folks to show them the results of our tests, since they didn't seem to know of any users using it for this yet and it could be a good secondary market for them to get into... I'm also curious about Silverback (silverbackapp.com) but wasn't able to get into an early beta spot in time for our testing. It actually looks really similar to ScreenFlow in any case.

metajack 18y ago
I wanted to write an app to do usability testing for a while, and then screenflow came out and my first thought was "This is exactly what I wanted, and even better to boot." I have a hard time believing no one else is using it for this. I'm glad it's working out well for you. We'll be starting to use it for this in the near future.