The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Usability Testing the Holiday Letter
Monday - December 01, 2008 01:41 PM in
by Peter Leppik
This year my family decided to try something different for our annual holiday letter to friends and family: we're including a papercraft snowflake ornament which the recipient can cut out, tape together, and hang on the tree. Makes a great activity for the kids, and maybe hangs around a little longer than the usual newsy letter.
Since this is the first time we've tried this, I was a little worried that the ornament might be too hard to assemble, or that the directions would be unclear. So I did what any self-respecting dork would do: I enlisted relatives over Thanksgiving weekend to participate in a usability test of the holiday letter.
Obviously this wasn't as elaborate as a usability study for a multi-million dollar speech recognition application. I gave each participant (ten, including two of my kids) a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, a paperclip, and a copy of the ornament with the assembly instructions. Then I watched quietly to see how each person tried to put it together.
As a result of this usability test, I made two rounds of changes to the ornament design and instructions: the dotted "cut here" lines got bolder, some of the instructions were rewritten, the artwork was revised, and helpful illustrations were added.
I consider this a success. I found some things which surprised me, and the end design is much easier to figure out than the original version. This proves two things in my mind:
First, no project is too small for usability testing.
Second, I am a total geek.
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