Flickr Flunks The Mom Test
Here is a good writeup from New York Times on why Flickr fails “The Mom Test”:
Flickr was the wrong tool for that job. The terminology is confusing — quick, what’s the difference between a Photo Group, a Photo Set and a Photo Stream? Worse, it takes seven mouse clicks, two pop-up menus and two dialog boxes to order one print of one photo. My mom wound up spending hours on what should have been a 10-minute job.
If you’re not familiar with The Mom Test, it’s basically a quick way to see if your site is so simple your mom can use it. A variant that can also reveal results fast for you is the “Five second usability test”, which is kind of similar, but gives you other results.
Related info:
- NY Times: Photo sharing even the folks can handle (June 5, 2007)
- Justaddwater.dk: The Mom Test (April 2006)
- UIE: 5-second usability test
Technorati Tags: usability, mom, test, usability testing, mom test, flickr, nytimes
