At Safari Books Online we have started a monthly Usability Friday — and you should, too!
The idea came from Steve Krug who outlined this model of running usability evaluations at last October’s Voices that Matter conference. He proposed that usability evaluation should be: regularly scheduled, attended in person rather than via webcast, and relatively fun and easy to manage. By making the process lightweight and inclusive (rather than formal and ponderous and overly documented) the evaluations are likely to be continued as part of a standard business process, rather than as a once-a-year hullabaloo. Specifically, he recommended having a morning of usability sessions (mostly in the form of one-on-one task analysis) followed by a team lunch to review interesting takeaways and next steps.
I posted the Usability Friday invitations on upcoming.org and pownce.com. The next one is scheduled for March 28.
Integrating regular usability review into your product roadmap makes sense — and this is a good way to start.
