Thanks so much for leaving this comment. Your statement:

“I am only 60, I can act as your site tester”

intrigued me. For starter, you helped us out already and it is very much appreciated Nils.
Second, age is most certainly one moderator that effects usability AND user experience of a web site, blog or tool hosted online.

Another factor might also be country the user comes from, cultural background, gender, level of education.

We tested for a few of these moderators and reported on our experiences here:

http://www.cytrap.eu/files/ComMetrics/2009/pdf/...

I hope the above is interesting . If there are other things that you or any of our readers, users and so forth think need to be improved, please drop me a line.

Thanks for commenting

Urs
http.//My.ComMetrics.com – benchmark your blog to improve

This is an interesting comment indeed. I have been wondering about these things myself. It is a difficult balancing act one must master to address lesson 2 successfully. The added difficulty with the Internet is that designing a good website is a critical step. But ever more important is that the designer is being comfortable using the technology effectively him/herself. This type of designer we were after for our website.

A great challenge to achieve usability is to make sure that the designer does not design something that fails to work with social media of today and maybe tomorrow. It is one thing to put up a great blog, however, offering users to share their comments written on a blog post easily is a second albeit very important step. Hence, to achieve usability you also need a designer who understands this challenge and feels comfortable building these options into the final design to enhance the user experience.

Step 5 is a real cruncher because unless one tests by making one tweak at the time and re-testing before doing the next one, things can go awfully wrong. My.ComMetrics.com tools can help but talking to users is key and to do some testing (e.g., change, test, change again, and so forth) is important. Especially, sometimes one can change one little thing only and then must test again before doing another change. Unless this is done, one is never sure what caused the results. To illustrate, we tweaked our sign up box with one byline, then we tested before we made the next change. Hence, we could identify succinctly which of either change triggered what kind of response from our target groups. This helped to improve the mileage we got out of the small changes in order to improve the user experience.

Fascinating topic and since we are now changing http://info.CyTRAP.eu and http://HowTo.ComMetrics.com as well, I am looking forward to see the improvements in the area of user experience.

Thanks for sharing Deni and Happy Holidays.

Thanks for your comment – I think video is great as long as people can get the message. However, as you probably know better than most, with the fragmentation of our markets (e.g., TV channels) it is becoming ever more difficult to reach a wide segment.

For instance, based on language, age, spending power, religion and so forth videos or visuals need to target their markets ever more carefully to avoid negative press with those possibly being offended or feeling misunderstood.

The next decade will show how effective we can handle these challenges. We will see who copes the best.

Thanks and I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas!

Also a biggie: Step 5, small changes can make big differences, both positive and negative. And this is one area where many surprises can pop up when testing. The determination of usability (or not) is in the testing. Not the designer's or anyone else's opinion.

And once you launch, further testing results come by way of analytics tools, like the one's provided by ComMetrics.