Insights

Usability testing is a useful tool in the developer's toolbox, but needs to be done consistently and fairly in order to make sure that everyone's expectations are met.

There are some amazing tools available for developers on the web, from pretty-printing your code to validating it, from colour palettes for visual impairments to tools for testing APIs. Here are some of my favourites. Stack Overflow This is the go-to site for questions and answers about coding. It has questions and answers on just about every programming language that you can think of - PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and more. And every environment you can think of - Windows, iOS, Android, and so on. And every mark-up and styling language - HTML, XML, CSS, and Sass. Stack Overflow has an awesome community of people willing to help complete strangers, which I think is amazing. I have learnt so much from reading Stack Overflow, and I haven't asked that many questions on there, because many of the common questions have already been asked and answered. User Experience This is the equivalent site to Stack Overflow for asking user experience questions (usability an...

Sometimes prototyping can seem like a big investment of time, but I find it is always worth it. In this article on User Experience Prototyping , Paul Boag, who has been in the field of user experience for over a decade, writes about the benefits of prototyping. When most people think of prototyping they are thinking about mocking up a user interface. There is no doubt that prototyping can help in this area. Organisations use prototyping to define and test experiences using all kinds of interfaces. Interfaces from mobile apps to enterprise systems. He identifies three key benefits of prototypes: they are inspiring , and allow people to understand what is being proposed, because they show stakeholders what it will look like; they ensure a common vision - it is much easier to agree to something and come away with a shared understanding of it if you have actually seen what it will look like; they are testable - you can actually do usability testing with them and fix any usability issues b...

Many people complain that usability testing is expensive and time-consuming. However, there is a very quick and very cheap approach to usability testing that any developer can adopt. It's called 'hallway usability testing' because you grab someone from the corridor and ask them to test your software feature that you've just developed. Obviously, as you have literally grabbed a passing colleague, you probably don't want to take up a huge amount of their time, so you only want to ask them one or two quick questions, such as "what do you think this icon means?" or, "can you find x piece of information?" The disadvantage of this approach is that the people you grab may well be other developers, and they may be so used to using lots of different kinds of software that they are not very representative of a 'naive user'. So hallway usability testing should really only be a precursor to real usability testing with a proper representative sample o...