I was surprised to see this, since Jakob Nielsen has a reputation for dedication to rigor and process in usability studies. His published studies are the gold standard of the industry. But sometimes he can give the impression that user testing should never be attempted at home.
In today’s Alertbox column, he says just the opposite:
Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.
I made the same point a while ago in a presentation I did for Forum One, where I walked through lots of shortcuts that still get good usability results, as well as the things you miss out on if you take those shortcuts.
Nielsen mentions several advantages to having a real expert conduct the tests. It’s worth adding another that I covered, and that he might not see as clearly given his perspective:
If you hire an expert, you get their perspective on where in the range people’s reactions fall, and how much attention you should pay to certain observations. For example, how worried should you be that people seemed to take a long time, even though they made the donation okay?
But that said, he’s absolutely right that you don’t need an expert every time, and it’s great to see such a respected researcher inviting amateurs into the kitchen.