Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, Second Edition

Foreword

Hey! I know you!

Well, I don't know you personally, but I know the type of person you are. After all, I'm a trained observer and I've already observed a few things.

First off, I observed that you're the type of person who likes to read a quality book. And, while you might appreciate a book about a dashing anthropology professor who discovers a mysterious code in the back of an ancient script that leads him on a globetrotting adventure that endangers his family and starts to topple the world's secret power brokers, you've chosen to pick up a book called Handbook of Usability Testing, Second Edition. I'm betting you're going to enjoy it just as much. (Sorry, there is no secret code hidden in these pages — that I've found — and I've read it four times so far.)

You're also the type of person who wonders how frustrating and hard to use products become that way. I'm also betting that you're a person who would really like to help your organization produce designs that delight its customers and users.

How do I know all these things? Because, well, I'm just like you; and I have been for almost 30 years. I conducted my first usability test in 1981. I was testing one of the world's first word processors, which my team had developed. We'd been working on the design for a while, growing increasingly uncomfortable with how complex it had become. Our fear was that we'd created a design that nobody would figure out.

In one of the first tests of its kind, we'd sat a handful of users down in ...