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I was recently re-reading some of Steve Krug’s great “Don’t Make Me Think” when I passed by his section on “The myth of the Average User.  It might be my favorite section of the book.  And the concept really came into focus for me again when my employer had some usability testing done on some of our Web apps.  Basically the myth is that a majority of Web user’s like any particular thing.  Or, in the case of our tests, take the same navigation path to complete a goal.  This is simply untrue.

Every user has unique likes and dislikes when it comes to a Web site.  It’s not even a case of a group of users being more advanced than another group.  I saw users that seemed to be advanced make the same mystifying decisions that the seemingly novice users did.  Mostly, I just watched people do things that I had never expected.  Some users liked to use a drop down to find what they were looking for.  Others liked the big button in the middle of the page.  And a third set used the text link in the sub menu. Along with a lack of any kind of average decision making, most users seemed a little less aware of the things I had thought to be general Web practices.  Watching this video helps emphasize that most Web users aren’t that much like most Web designers and developers.

So what does this mean for the poor Web designer?  We’re screwed!  Actually, all is not lost.  While trying to guess if a user will like drop down menus or not isn’t a good idea, designing sites and apps that don’t trip them up in achieving their goal is.  Testing is essential to this.  Following best practices helps too.  And having clearly defined goals definitely doesn’t hurt.  What I didn’t mention at the beginning of this post, is that testing my employer did was the second round of tests.  Months prior, we’d done a first round of testing on a working prototype of our new Web app.  That test was even more surprising.  But it enabled our team to identify our applications weaknesses and outright failures.  Once you fix most of the places were all the users will fail, you start to find that those weird likes and dislikes aren’t quite the deal-breaker they were before.  While not everyone said they liked using the drop down, they all were able to find their way to the right page and reach their goal when they got there.

While there is no way to know that an average amount of users are going to like the way your application returns its results, testing will tell you that the result display won’t work for most people.  And that’s the real key.  Don’t spend time arguing in a meeting about what you think a user will like.  Build it using your judgment and experience in design, then test to find its weaknesses.  Whatever the cost, it will undoubtedly be made up in a shortened development cycle and better end results.  So the next time your planning a big (or small) project, make sure to add usability testing to the process.  You won’t be sorry you did.