Applying discount usability engineering

Usability engineering isn´t just for the multimillion dollar companies with massive internal test labs. Jakob Nielsen, a distinguished engineer at SunSoft, relates how he and another designer (yes, a two-person project) employed low-cost, easily accessible techniques to perform several useful studies. The techniques, detailed in his recent book Usability Engineering (AP Professional, 1994), are virtually free of complex statistical methods, relying instead on simple observation and interpretation