Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think has been the book I recommend for anyone interested in understanding usability. His second effort, Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, expands the idea of one of the chapters in Don’t Make Me Think. Staying true to the book’s subtitle of The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, the book is a DIY guide to identify usability issues; though the fixing part is glossed over in the book. Steve Krug guides us through a process of conducting a small usability test and provides guidelines to run one such test in the book.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
The key ‘maxims’ according to Steve Krug are:
- A morning a month, that’s all we ask. [Conduct a simple three-person usability test frequently.]
- Start earlier than you think makes sense. [Begin your testing as early as possible in your product development.]
- Recruit loosely and grade on a curve. [Try to get people who match your end-user profiles closely. Improvise if required.]
- Make it a spectator sport. [Involve everyone associated with the project and get them involved.]
- Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the most important problems. [Fix the important issue first.]
- When fixing problems, always do the least you can do. [The smallest changes are the most easiest change to make.]
At the end of the book, you get an idea on how to conduct a small usability test. The book tries to limit itself to a DIY approach and hence skips a large-scale usability testing process. But once one gets experience conducting usability tests on a smaller scale, it is just a matter of scaling it up to encompass a large usability test scenario.
If you have read Don’t Make Me Think and Designing the Obvious and you are still interested in getting your hands dirty with usability, then this book is definitely a must-read and a must-have in your bookshelf and I would rate it as 4/5.