A booze-free way to drunk test your website

It’s late on a Friday night. You’re at home, still moderately (or heavily, we don’t judge) intoxicated. You really should be getting to bed, but you can’t sleep, so what do you do? Well 3 Sheets Market Research thinks that, more often than not, you will go on the internet.

3 Sheets believes that overlooking a drunken user’s experience is a big oversight by most marketing companies, so much so they had intoxicated people test various websites with results that are both amusing and revealing. This example, a video of a drunk woman attempting to use Windows 8 shows how potentially confusing a start screen with too many options could be, and how too many bright colors can feel overwhelming to an impaired person.

Software designer and Twitter user @rynclsnr, agrees that many website designers forget to “cater to the lowest common denominator . . . the user when they're drunk,” and that testing the ability of a drunk person to navigate through a website is important. Specifically, this test is important not only because drunk people may want to use that website, but also because the experience a drunk person has while using it will be similar to the experience a distracted, overly stressed, or otherwise impaired person will have. 

Therefore, in order to easily test websites without having to actually have drunk people test the website, he developed Drunk User Testing. 

After installing Drunk User Testing, a web designer can press the “get drunk” button on any site and DUT will slightly blur the site and cause it to shift. This enables the designer to optimize the design so that virtually anyone in any state of mind can use it. To leave drunk mode, simply click the escape button and the site will go back to normal.

Drunk user testing can definitely help web designers make sites that are cleaner, simpler, and easier to use. Let’s just hope no one decides to use it to give Facebook or Twitter a makeover. Some sites are better used sober.

By MaryElizabeth Koepele

Story via pfsk