Appendix C: How this Book was Usability Tested

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This book recommends testing websites on representative users throughout development to inform design decisions and expose usability problems. The same argument can be made for this book. This book did in fact benefit from testing of two sorts.

Customer Feedback on "Release 1.0"

This book is a sequel to a similar book, and so can be considered "version 2.0." Its predecessor, GUI Bloopers (Johnson, 2000), was published three years before. Readers of that book provided much feedback in comments posted at online bookstores, at GUI-Bloopers.com's discussion area, and in email messages.

The positive feedback need not concern us here beyond noting that there was enough of it to justify a sequel. Of more interest here are readers complaints about GUI Bloopers. These were important input for Web Bloopers.

• Verbosity. Some readers complained that GUI Bloopers is more verbose than necessary. As a result, this book is much less so.

• No figure captions. Figures in GUI Bloopers were numbered and marked as good vs. bad examples, but they had no captions. Readers often had to read the surrounding text to understand the point of figures. In Web Bloopers, figures are captioned and annotated.

• Made-up figures. Many example screen images in GUI Bloopers were artificial, made up to illustrate particular bloopers well. In contrast, this book uses real websites as examples almost exclusively.

• No checklist. Other than its Table of Contents, GUI Bloopers had no terse summary of all the bloopers for software developers to use as a quick-reference checklist. For Web Bloopers, a quick-reference list is available on the book's website.

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