If you missed posts on Monday or Tuesday of this week, you might want to start with why I’m talking “Usability“.

I’ve been talking (ok fine, rambling) a little about Usability & how I think it’s important.

When companies run Usability Tests, it’s actually very technical and very well planned out.  It includes test plans, target market recruitment, questionnaires, incentives, one-on-one interviews or focus groups, lots of note taking, time stamping, categorizing, likert scales, percentages, graphs, recordings, and money!

So, how can you as a one-person blog owner practice a little usability on your site?

If you write primarily for your friends and family with no or little desire of monetizing or having a niche, here’s what I would suggest:

1.  Create a list of about 5-7 things that your readers either do the most often or that you’d like them to do.  It might look something like this:

a.  Read your most recent post.
b.  Comment on that post.
c.  Subscribe to your blog.
d.  Follow you on Twitter.
e.  Find an old post about _____ (pick a topic, any topic).

2.  Log out of your blog (delete your history if needed) – The goal is to visit your blog as if are a new reader so you don’t want it “remembering you”.

3.  Revisit your blog and attempt those five simple tasks that you created. Make notes of things that you liked or didn’t like about the process.  Make notes of things that were hard or cumbersome, took too much time, or that you really liked.  You might be surprised!  Some of the things that you either like or don’t like when visiting other blogs, might *gasp* be the same way your readers feel when they visit yours!

4.  Be patient.  Don’t make any changes just yet.

5.  Do you have a spouse, friend, fellow blog reader (or even your mother!) that owes you a favor?  Now ask them (the more the merrier) to do those same tasks. Get their opinions & notes.

6.  Now sit back and look at all your notes carefully. Since there wasn’t anything scientific about selecting your “testers”, it may be necessary for you to weed through some comments.  For instance, did you ask your 98 year old grandmother to look at it?  Maybe she’s super computer savvy, reads your blog all the time and you value her opinion – so make sure all her answers count!  But if she’s not & she couldn’t even figure out how to find your blog in the first place, then you should probably throw out some of her responses!!  Just use your best judgment.  But chances are, even with a crazy testing group you’ll probably learn a little something that could be helpful!!

So have you ever “tested” your own site?  How did you do it?  Did you learn anything?

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up the series (unless something totally awesome hits me) with some more in-depth tips on how to practice Usability if you’re blog is your business.

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