Mobile Usability Methods: How to Run Your Own Mobile User Studies
- San Francisco: Saturday, April 7
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Training Course
In recent years, we have seen an explosion of interest in development for mobile devices and tablets.
Many companies have mobile websites and mobile applications, but how do you make sure that these applications
are easy to use and satisfy your customers’ needs? The best way to do it is to test your mobile designs
with real users.
NNG has conducted a plethora of mobile user research studies since 2000, both for our independent research
reports and for consulting clients. We've tested the range of platforms from now-primitive smartphones, over
touchscreen phones, to full-sized tablets and e-book readers. We'll report the lessons-learned from more than
a decade of mobile usability studies and save you from making the mistakes we made in the early years.
The advice in this course is platform-independent, which has two benefits:
- It doesn't matter whether you develop for iPhone/iPad/iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, or
any other platform: you should test your design with users; and the methods for doing so are much the
same.
- The methods you learn in this course will help you improve the user experience of any future mobile
platform or technologies that may emerge in coming years. Learning good user research methodology is a
way of future-proofing your career.
What You’ll Learn
- The benefits of testing your mobile platform
- What kind of testing method you should choose: Field studies, diary studies, or lab testing
- How to plan your mobile user testing: Recruiting participants, designing tasks, finding the right equipment
- How to conduct your mobile user testing
- How to analyze your data and report findings
- When it's safe to cut corners and reduce costs and when you must stay true to the methodology to get valid
results (the only thing worse than no user research is bad research that produces direct misleading findings)
Course Outline
- Why should you test your mobile platform?
- Setting goals for your user study
- Choosing a user testing method for your platform
- Diary study
- Field study
- Paper and low-fidelity prototyping
- Usability testing in the lab
- Recruiting participants
- Number of participants
- Screener tips
- Conducting user studies in the lab
- How to make sure your lab is appropriate for mobile testing
- What equipment you will need
- Structured versus unstructured testing
- Types of tasks and how to describe them
- How to interact with the user
- Using the “think-aloud” protocol
- Managing observers
- Collecting and analyzing the data
- Reporting the data
- Paper prototyping for mobile
- What tools you will need
- Study logistics
- Diary and field studies
- How to set up your study
- How to ask for data
- How to keep participants motivated and engaged
- How to manage participants
- Tools to make data collection easier
- How to analyze and report the data
- Other research methods for mobile
- Surveys
- Remote testing
- Eyetracking
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and video clips from our research.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This tutorial complements the other mobile usability courses at our conference. It is intended for anyone who wants to conduct mobile usability tests, or who wants some background in mobile usability methods before hiring external consultants to conduct user research. It will work best for people who have either never conducted a usability test or who are relatively new to the discipline.
See Also
We offer additional courses that are related to this course:
- User Testing is the better choice if you're developing traditional
(non-mobile) websites or applications. There is enough overlap between the regular User Testing course
and the Mobile Usability Methods course that we don't recommend taking both courses.
- Research Beyond User Testing is not specifically targeted at mobile
and the Mobile Usability Methods course does cover the most important methods beyond user testing.
Still, the course on Research Beyond User Testing goes into additional depth about a broader set of
methods and is recommended as an additional course if you want to conduct substantial non-testing research.
- Selling Usability: Convincing Colleagues, Driving Organizational Change.
This course is on how to make the rest of the team pay attention to the research findings and act on them.
If you are an experienced usability researcher who has conducted many usability sessions (not necessarily on mobile),
we recommend that you take the Mobile User Experience 1 and/or
Mobile User Experience 2 courses instead. These courses report the findings and
design guidelines from our research. The Mobile Usability Methods course doesn't present our research findings;
it's purely about how to conduct your own research to learn about your own design.
Instructor
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. At NN/g she consults
for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, usability of touch devices,
cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human computer interaction. She coauthored the NN/g
reports on mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children’s websites. Budiu previously worked
at Xerox PARC, doing research in human-computer interaction. At PARC, she built computational models of how people
search for information in visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring
information scent and conducted research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits
of tagging. Budiu was also a user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and
made strategic recommendations for incorporating user-generated content and social web features into MSN. Budiu
has authored more than 20 articles and conference presentations on human-computer interaction, psychology, and
cognitive science. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
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