Are you customer centred?
The first step in usability survival is to make sure that your development process is customer centred. This means making sure that customers are involved in the design and evaluation of the system.
This page reproduces an assessment form from the book "E-commerce Usability", in Excel format. The test will help you measure where you are now and provide a framework to help you improve. Use this to work out the strengths and weaknesses in your current process.
“These are tools and techniques that the entire design team can use, not just for those 'weird usability people'.”
— Keith Instone, founder of usableweb.com.
To view a larger image of the lifecycle model in a pop-up window, choose the link below (gif image, 76KB).
You can also download two of the worksheets from the book. The book contains a further seven worksheets to help you through each stage of the customer centred design process.
- The customer profiling worksheet provides a set of detailed prompts so that you can characterise the people who use your site.
- The key performance indicator worksheet helps you set usability objectives for the site.
