I have been involved with many user surveys over the years. Some have gone well. Some have been a complete waste of time and effort. The main distinction between them is the surveys that were professionally developed and pretested would succeed. The ones that had been knocked together by a well meaning manager were often destined to failure.
It comes down to this – unless you have experience designing surveys, then it’s best to either hire someone who has had experience and training, or find another way to collect the same information.
You have built the perfect web site, the colours invoke the right emotional response, the visual imagery leads customers to the relevant information while allowing the audience to personally relate to the site. The content is ideal for the web, not to much but enough to convince people of the service. The major call to actions are in the right locations, and easy to find. Everything is set, the web site is ready to take on the world!
Still no matter how perfect your site is, if the last step, when they encounter the web form, isn’t streamlined and usable, the rest is a waste of time.
I’m seeing an interesting trend here in Perth. Recently, job adverts and recruiters looking for Test Analysts to do usability and accessibility testing as part of their duties. Now this is a good thing in a way.
At least the traditional roles of the IT software project are understanding the need for usability and accessibility testing in web and general software projects. I guess something is better than nothing, right?
Well maybe not.
You know in accessibility circles we are constantly telling people using drop down CSS menus that when the menus are not visible we shouldn’t be using display:none to achieve this. We all know this one, right. Just to refresh your memory, remember the display:none rule takes an element assigned right out of the picture completely, for anyone using a screen reader the assigned content will just not “exist”.
This is all well and good. Well that depends, maybe there is a case for the use of display:none afterall.
