June 02, 2003

Usability on the cheap

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox has a number of tips for doing Usability for $200. In his scenario, a small business plans on spending $2000 on a site, of which 10% will go to usability activities. Nielsen lays out a four-pronged plan of attack:

One hour to question customers about their information needs
One hour to review an early version of the design
One hour for a quick, in-store test of the design
One hour to enhance the site's search engine visibility

Since some of our projects end up in this range, and many of the schools/districts in our area have similarly small web publishing budgets, this article seems relevant.