Chapter List

In this final part, we discuss how we measured and tested the sites in our study.

This isn't intended to be an overview of usability testing; there are plenty of other resources for that. Rather, you can use this information in two ways:

• If you want to compare your web site directly to the ones we tested, you'll need to conduct your usability tests the same way we did.
• If you only want to make your site more usable and help users find information, you can adapt our methods to suit your purposes.

Overview

This chapter describes the methods we used, including the types of questions we asked, the data we collected, and how we calculated the site rankings.

We assume that you already have some familiarity with usability testing. If not, two good books to look at are Penny Bauersfeld's Software by Design: Creating People Friendly Software (New York, M&T Books, 1994) and Jakob Nielsen's Usability Engineering (San Diego, Academic Press, 1993).

There are many different ways to conduct usability tests of web sites, depending on the purpose of the site. If you want to compare your web site directly against the sites we tested, you'll need to conduct your usability tests the same way we did. If you want to improve the usability of your own site to help users find information, you can adapt our methods to suit your purposes.

Types of...