Step One: Read Steve Krug's Rocket Surgery Made Easy[1]

Step Two: There is no step two

[1]: http://www.sensible.com/rocketsurgery/index.html

But not a new one: "Rocket Surgery Made Easy", by Steve Krug, http://amzn.com/0321657292

This is already on haskell.org and I know it was posted here in the early stages, but maybe a few maybe-interested-in-trying-Haskell-ers haven't heard of it and would like to try Haskell. As of this week there are 30 tutorial steps / 7 lessons, finishing at the type system (so far).

There's a lot more potential for this project (adding a CodeMirror editor with "loadable" code, allowing uploading of tutorials like a pastebin... but a tutorialbin, asking exercise questions which are then quickcheck'd, etc.), but I like to incrementally add and then get feedback.

For newbies to Haskell I would like your feedback/comments, if you have any. I'm hoping to reach fresh Haskell newbies here on Hacker News for an unbiased experience.

I asked a non-programmer friend to try it out a while ago and got some invaluable feedback. Send it to your friends, just to see how far they get! Post what they say! Anyone who's read something like Rocket Surgery Made Easy will be familiar with how invaluable feedback is.

I am also interested in hearing about general ideas on what you think would just be cool to see.

If you want to let me know about bugs please post them here: http://github.com/chrisdone/tryhaskell/issues Granted there are some browser/OS oddities but I can only test on so many! Bugfixes welcome! PM me on github.

Cheers!

I wholeheartedly disagree. You can't ask most consumers what they think of an undeveloped business idea. They don't know what they want.

At a minimum you have to put something visual in front of them, even better if its a prototype. Check out Rocket Surgery Made Easy (http://www.sensible.com/rocketsurgery/index.html).

The sequel to Don't Make Me Think is entirely about how to do quick usability testing. It's called Rocket Surgery Made Easy, and I highly recommend it. He walks through each of the tools used, how to structure questions, and all of the other important pieces.

It made starting my grad work in usability much less painful.

This sort of approach is a classic way of doing cheap usability testing.

If you've not done this sort of work before I'd recommend getting hold of the (short and entertaining) "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" by Steve Krug. It'll give you a bunch of useful tips on how to get the best out of our time.

The "complete package" gave me sticker shock, so much that I almost closed the page then and there. It was only out of curiosity as to why the $200 price tag was worthwhile that I even kept reading to find more purchase options. It put a bad taste in my mouth, honestly, and I'm left feeling pretty confused by why you won't let me cherry pick my own interview+book package. I'm just having trouble seeing the dollar value in what you've assembled, though I'm sure if I broke out each piece of what you're offering, it'd seem like quite a deal, no one is offering "pieces" of what you're offering, so I just see the whole thing as overpriced.

I was excited to follow the development of this through the newsletter, but I'm not a customer now. Maybe if you offered to trickle out the interview content as you developed it, for some kind of $9/mo fee? I would've been on board with that, or a similar approach. Though I guess not being a total squid I might not have been your target, I was really just interested in what those accomplished professionals had to say, maybe also thumbing through the book -- which while I'm at it -- I'm also not convinced provides the kind of value a $30 price should. I was kind've under the impression you'd include some real "how-to" meat, at least periodically, but there doesn't appear to be any of that. I think I'd get more value out of "Don't Make Me Think" or "Rocket Surgery Made Easy", and I could score both in a native kindle format(for $30).

I think you probably did a lot of hard work, and I'm still tempted to spend the $200 just for the interviews; but I don't feel good enough about what I might be getting. I saw the early version of the Ryan Singer interview and it didn't leave a $200 impression. I hope you've had a lot more success selling to others who really need a comprehensive resource or don't understand many of the fundamentals, it certainly seemed like it would be more valuable for them.

Also, just as an aside, the WordPress favicon feels cheap, and worse, lazy.

There are actually a couple of books that can probably help with this kind of
informal user experience testing. Both are by Steve Krug. The first is "Don't
Make Me Think" which focuses on design for usability, and includes a chapter
titled "Usability Testing on 10 Cents a Day". The second is "Rocket Surgery
Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability
Problems" (already mentioned by petervandijck). This is a newer book (2009)
that goes much more deeply into usability testing for people whose primary
responsibility is design and development rather than user experience. It's a
great book in spite of the cutesy name.

Why not have a go yourself?

If you have a Mac laptop, you've got yourself a mobile usability station. Just get a copy of Silverback App ( http://silverbackapp.com/ ) and start usability testing!

Following on from that, if you'd like to make the most of your usability tests I'd recommend getting "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" by Steve Krug which will run you through the general process: http://www.sensible.com/rocketsurgery/index.html

If you want to start doing usability testing I'd recommend getting a copy of Steve Krug's Rocket Surgery Made Easy (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-yourself/dp...). It will probably take you less than an hour to read and will stop you making the basic mistakes I see folk new to usability testing make.

Everybody seems to be missing the biggest lesson from this. No matter how obvious you think the problems with the OPs site was you should...

DO USABILITY TESTING

Often.

Because if those problems were obvious to the OP - they would have fixed them. By definition. I guarantee that everybody here has there own blind spots with there own application or service.

I've been doing usability tests for nearly twenty years now - and the number of times we've found nothing that can be improved can be counted on approximately no hands.

Use online services like peek (there are many, many others too). Do them yourselves. Do them regularly. If I could pick only one thing to help folk improve their product - usability testing would be it. Even above customer interviewing. Nothing beats watching your customers try and fail to use your product.

Here's three books to get you started:

* Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, Steve Krug - Does exactly what it says on the tin. Short sharp guide to getting you started.

* Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, Jeffrey Rubin & Dana Chisnell - The last book but in much more depth. The first edition of this was my bible when I started doing usability testing.

* Remote Research, Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte - A great guide to how to approach getting the most out of remote usability testing services like peek. The tools are a few years out of date now. The advice isn't.

Seriously. If you're not already doing usability tests go spend an hour or two reading 'Rocket Surgery Made Easy' and then go test your product with some actual human beings. You'll thank me.

I absolutely understand. I'm not a marketing person either, but I have some experience in usability research, and I think you will get as much value from testing the homepage with a few fresh faces as you would from a marketing project. There is an interesting crossover between usability and product marketing when it comes to homepages and messaging.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend Steve Krug's new book "Rocket surgery made easy", which is focused on guerilla usability testing. Usability testing is classically about identifying problems/improvements to a UI, but you can quite easily use the same techniques to test your homepage and figure out whether people understand the product and whether the homepage encourages them to try it out, etc.
Have fun!

1. On the authentication screen, white text is displayed over a light gray background which makes for very bed legibility.

2. Can some of the sidebar widgets be collapsed or even removed to help reduce overall noise?

3. I'd suggest moving the "Activity Update" panel above the "Tasks" panel, just under the user's name and profile photo, since updating status is presumably the primary goal for most users.

4. The "Edit Profile" button below the primary navigation could be removed and replaced with a hover invitation link next to the user's name or perhaps by clicking the profile photo, further reducing the number of elements competing for attention. On a related note, could "My Tasks" be removed since it is already displayed prominently in the main content area?

5. On "Case" pages, the actions displayed below the primary navigation are difficult to visually scan and parse. This is compounded by the fact that unrelated buttons share colors, making it difficult for the user to create a mental model and anticipate expected behavior. A dropdown menu of options might be more appropriate to show all available actions in this case, and would further reduce overall noise.

6. There is another usability issue to consider with the buttons placed directly below the primary navigation bar. If I run the cursor too close to the top of the target area for the buttons, I can easily trigger a dropdown hover from one of the primary navigation menu items above it. That could get frustrating in everyday use.

Have you done any structured usability or task completion testing with real users yet? Check out Steve Krug's book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" for some ideas there. You could also gain a lot of inexpensive insight using services like feedbackarmy.com, userfly.com or loop11.com. Hope that helps.

I found it possible to absorb more knowledge (wisdom?) about UX by performing user tests than by any other method of studying the subject.

Grab a copy of "Rocket Surgery made Easy" by Steve Krug, a copy of Silverback for Mac, and start doing some user tests.

In time, you will start to see the same patterns coming up over and over again, and this information will begin to unwittingly inform your thinking during the design phase.

This isn't going to help you with visual design so much, but it certainly will help you with the communication aspects of the software/website, and will help you to avoid design/UX pitfalls.