The members of a systems development project team have gone out for lunch together, and as often happens, the conversation has turned to work. The team has been working on the development of the user interface design, and so far, work has been progressing smoothly. The team should be completing work on the interface prototypes early next week. A combination of storyboards and language prototypes has been used in this project. The storyboards depict the overall structure and flow of the system, but the team developed lan$-$ guage prototypes of the actual screens because they felt that seeing the actual screens would be valuable for the users.

Chris $($the youngest member of the project team$)$: I read an article last night about a really cool way to evaluate a user interface design. It$$s called usability testing, and it$$s done by all the major software vendors. I think we should use it to evaluate our interface design.

Heather $($system analyst$)$: I$$ve heard of that, too, but isn$$t it really expensive?

Mark $($project manager$)$: I$$m afraid it is expensive, and I$$m not sure we can justify the expense for this project.

Chris: But we really need to know that the interface works. I thought this usability testing technique would help us prove we have a good design.

Amy $($systems analyst$)$: It would, Chris, but there are other ways, too. I assumed we$$d do a thorough walkthrough with our users and present the interface to them at a meeting. We can project each interface screen so that the users can see it and give us their reaction. This is probably the most effi$-$ cient way to get the users$$ response to our work.

Heather: That$$s true, but I$$d sure like to see the users sit down and work with the system. I$$ve always learned a lot by