Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

Description of the article « Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems »

Usability testing sounds expensive and complicated. Rocket Surgery Made Easy shows that it doesn't have to be. Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think, walks you through running small tests yourself, with a handful of users and one morning a month.

What you'll learn

The book covers the whole process: choosing tasks for people to try, finding participants, running a session, and getting your team to watch. Krug's approach focuses on finding the most serious problems and fixing them with the smallest change that works, instead of writing long reports nobody reads.

It includes sample scripts and checklists, so you can run your first session soon after you finish reading.

Who it's for

It's written for people who aren't usability specialists: designers, developers, product managers and small teams without a research budget.

The book dates from 2010, so some of its tool suggestions have aged, and its method is deliberately lightweight rather than a full research process. For a broader introduction to research, including interviews, see Introduction to User Research for UX Beginners.