This presentation from Steve Krug, author of the wonderful book “Don’t make me think“, is a concise and easy to follow overview of usability testing. Lots of simple, practical things in it for anyone building software/websites who want to create great user experiences. There are some things you would have no doubt heard before but there are a lot of thoughts and approaches that I found were new and valuable for me including:

• Give up on validity – the usability problems will be so obvious that you won’t need numbers to validate them. Once you give up on validity then you don’t need to worry about questionnaires or surveys. This will save considerable time in the sessions.
• Just give me one morning a month – I love this idea the most. I’ve often been in the situation where I just can’t seem to convince the client to do user testing so the idea of asking for one morning a month is great – who can refuse that!
• Only communicate the top 3 problems to stakeholders, if you tell them everything they will be tempted to solve the low hanging fruit and not address the most important usability issues.