Who is stil indecisive whether to buy the book or not you can listen to an interview at boagworld.com (Episode 202 - http://boagworld.com/podcast/202 ). Paul and Steve are very entertaining. Unfortunately there were not many critical requests about the approach.
Great point. It doesnāt matter if you have the best product in the world. If folks canāt figure out how to use it quickly youāll never get more than a few users.
Iāll definitely be checking out those books.
I have to say the best results Iāve gotten from (usability) testing is sitting down/chatting online whilst the most stupid (I hate that word, but it is the only accurate one) of users try to use my app and helping them through it so that they can keep hitting the UI snags and even turn up some bugs that everyone else was just too sensible to ever trigger. The stupid users tend to get stuck in many places and reveal whole piles of issues very quickly, whereas regular users tend to avoid the more common mistakes and adapt more quickly to your new ones.
Whilst I tend to know about problems that āregularā users pick up on before they even report them, Iām often surprised by the things the āidiotsā try. Things so silly that, without my realising, I implicitly assumed users would not try to do them, whilst writing the code/designing the interface.
Iāve never released software with an intended audience of larger than a few hundred users, so I guess that if you have a big enough user base this might do itself through support e-mails etc.
Alan Cooperās The Inmates are Running the Asylum was a pretty good read about usability too, and details some nice processes used in his interaction design.
If you canāt get eyeTracking working with a laptop webcam, OpenCV, RentACoder, and $80, then, well, you arenāt very clever.