Probably Random

Rocket Surgery Made Easy

Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Steve Krug

If you design anything used by people and you’ve never done any user testing then you must read this! It sets out a simple way to get started on the road to user testing.

I have done some user testing over the years both as facilitator and as observer, so a lot of the book isn’t ‘new’, however there is always more to learn and it’s always good to get other peoples insights and ideas, so it was still extremely useful.

The book is a quick and simple read (Krug’s aim is to make it short enough to read on a flight) , it has the same ease of access as Don’t make me think, and whilst I now want to run off and do more testing, I didn’t feel quite as ‘changed’ at the end of reading it as I did with Don’t make me think.  Perhaps I felt more connection with Don’t make me think as I read the second edition and the ‘new’ chapters in it were the same concepts we’d just published some research papers on so I felt a real connection to it.

(* co-naturality, the same idea can be thought up by different people across the globe at the same time, it doesn’t belong to anyone,  and especially if you are researching the same topic the fact that two sets of researchers came to the same conclusion just adds weight to the idea.)