Wanted – Five Good Men & True (This Is An Equal-opportunity Offer)

Discovering Web 2-Point-Oh 101: A Grey-beard’s Adventure in On-line Marketing

Wanted – Five Good Men & True (This Is An Equal-opportunity Offer)

Web 2-Point-Oh – I love it. It’s all about sharing and that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Trouble is, a lot of the time my warm comes from my raised blood pressure and my fuzzy comes from the fluttering I get at the edges of my vision when I’m about to blow my virtual top.

And why is this? - because so many of the web sites I go onto are built for geeks and not for ordinary mortals (or even greybeards) like you’n’me. So not only do you need to speak Geek – you need to think Geek just to be able to find your way around.

You ever tried to do anything intuitive in a BANK? Bad enough in the actual banking hall, but almost impossible on line.

So I was excited to discover Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox – and I subscribed to it immediately (and I’ve learned more from three or four articles from this ou than most people’ve taught me in the last six months).

Dr. Nielson studies web usability and this week’s Alert was all about testing.

It is, he says, possible to test sites inexpensively – and in fact it’s preferable.

I’ve only ever once been part of a focus group; a friend and I were asked to play Consumer-Consumer for a vehicle manufacturer. We spent an hour looking into the belly of the beast, peered into the cubbyhole, sat behind the wheel and joined dozens of others in making “hm” and “hmmmmm-hmm” comments about a car that really had absolutely no “hm” factor at all.

Then they paid us R200.00 each (no, really – and this was in ’93, remember: if I’m not mistaken we used the money to buy a condominium or two on the Gold Coast). And three months later the car came onto the market.

Unchanged.

So WHAT, please tell me, was the purpose?

It was an expensive exercise and all it did was prove to the marketing okes that the design okes knew what they were doing. Kind of.

And would I ever buy one of those cars? Hell no. Nor recommend them to anyone else.

I suspect that many web sites are built the same way – and, if they’re tested at all, tested in the same way, too. On big budget sites, the testing validates the expense and proves to the board what the board wants to hear (and with boards, as we know, bullshit baffles brains almost every time. Real entrepreneurs have to work for their money).

Which is why reading one of the articles in Dr. Nielson’s back catalgue caused me to let out a whoop that frightened the dog right off her couch (first time in weeks).

It is, he said, vital that you begin designing your site on paper and test it on paper – and this is how I’ve been doing web sites for 5 years or more: I’ve developed a method of writing them in movie script form in MSWord so that the information architecture is testable – and easily and quickly and cheaply changeable – before it even GETS to the Geeks (why should I have to speak Geek? Let them speak English!).

I’ve extended this even to the most complicated of the sites I’ve been involved in – I’m particularly proud of www.buffalohills.co.za and www.visitmosselbay.co.za, which have both drawn many, many compliments (and although they’re both still Web 1-Point-Oh, we’ve begun the process of bringing them onto a Web 2-Point-Oh platform. Watch this space).

What Dr. Nielson says, though, is an extension of what I’ve always done – and it’s something I’m going to put into practice very, very quickly: test at every stage, he says, test again, and – here’s the crunch – use no more than 5 guinea pigs every time you do.

“Frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused” (in Weekly User Testing: TiVo Did It, You Can, Too) … and “The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact on the design process” (in Fast, Cheap, and Good: Yes, You Can Have It All).

So although my Geek (the sainted Laurence Tuck of Innate Advertising) and I have spent hundreds of hours tweaking my sites and blogs at www.thistourismweek.co.za and www.barefootclients.co.za, we’ve still never tested them on real, live people.

… Which brings me to my plea:

I’m looking for five good men and true to test This Tourism Week (women, please feel free to apply: no focus group needed to show that you’re better men than the any of the men out there).

Give me ten minutes of your time and the world (this is the world-wide-web, after all) will owe you a debt of gratitude forever…

Talk to me, martin@barefootclients.co.za – or leave your comments below for everyone to see.