User Surveys and User Testing
 

See usableweb.com and useit.com for links to many articles and web sites devoted to user surveys and user testing of web sites.
 

Jennifer Fleming, author of Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience (O'Reilly, 1998), on user testing...
(These ideas were expressed in an Amazon.com interview that is no longer on their web site).

• Data is nice, it provides a record...to support political decisions, but from a design point of view...insight is the only useful outcome of a user test.

• It doesn't matter whether you use quantitative methods (timed task completion, eye tracking) or a narrative, qualitative approach (observing, listening, looking for patterns in results).

• The end result is insight about where the problems lie (and, ideally how to fix them).