Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

Chapter 11. The least you can do™

Why doing less is often the best way to fix things

It was in Chinatown.What were you doing there?Working for the District Attorney.Doing what?As little as possible.

—J. J. GITTES (JACK NICHOLSON) AND EVELYNMULWRAY (FAYE DUNAWAY), IN CHINATOWN

Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned over the years about fixing the problems you discover in a usability test:

This means that when you’re deciding how to fix a usability problem, the question you should always be asking is

“What’s the smallest, simplest change we can make that’s likely to keep people from having the problem we observed?”

But I find that people ...