Sitestone

Paul Boag over at Headscape’s blog has a nice short article about why usability testing is important.

He talks briefly about the benefits of user testing, including:

• Fast issue detection
• Increased user satisfaction
• Reduced support costs
• Increased efficiency

As he rightly point out, full-blown usability testing in a lab is too expensive for most smaller web projects. However, even having one or a few persons testing an early prototype of the website or web application will reveal many problems early on in the process. Problems the developer(s) might not see, having been involved with the building of the interface and interaction design from the start of the process.