Knowing when to keep your lips zipped. Good skill.

Nope, I’m not talking about matters of diplomacy, or secrecy. But rather when you want to consider and measure someone’s reactions to a web site you’re building, and don’t want your interaction with them to negatively influence the value of that effort.

I like to get people to look at pages I’ve written, and watch them as they surf around the site. I’ll ask them if they will look at the site, and see if they can find some things for me.

These might include a particular product or service, or contact information, or the name of one of the people who works for the company. It can be hard not to tell them where to click, or which part of page to look at. But, even this high discount approach to usability testing requires the insight to know when to keep quiet, and how to phrase questions or suggestions that don’t adversely influence the impromptu testing.

The STC Usability Special Interest Group (SIG) has an article in April’s Newsletter titled How Much Interaction is Too Much?, which has some good suggestions.

Things such as the preparation of a pre-written testing script can help you focus upon the interaction between the site and your tester, without too much interaction on your part.

(via DonnaM)