User Testing
- Toronto: Monday, August 9
- San Francisco: Sunday, October 3
Marieke Obdeyn
Hoa Loranger
Full-Day Tutorial
User testing is cheap to perform and—when done early and often—it can save months
of development effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if you can’t justify hiring a company to do user testing for you, performing one
quick usability study yourself with nothing more than a pen, a notepad, and a stopwatch will give
you enough material to keep your development team busy for many weeks.
In this tutorial, we’ll explore the skills you need to conduct your own usability tests.
You’ll discover techniques that require minimal budget and only a few days of time, yet can
still uncover major usability issues in software, hardware, and websites.
What You’ll Learn
- The benefits of testing real people
- Why test results generalize to your whole user base
- How to plan your usability test
- How to recruit good participants and ensure they show up
- What test materials you’ll need
- How to conduct the test
- The best way to interact with participants
- How to get team members to attend sessions
- What to do when things go wrong
- Effective ways to analyze your findings
- Strategies for getting your recommendations implemented
Course Outline
- Why conduct usability research?
- Discount usability testing: Why only five participants?
- Qualitative vs. quantitative testing
- The “think aloud” protocol
- The components of usability
- How to measure usability
- Planning a study
- Goals
- Location
- Equipment
- Lab setup options
- Logistics
- Recruiting participants
- Identifying target users
- Creating a screener
- Incentives
- Tips for finding qualified participants
- Writing good tasks for the study
- Exploratory and directed tasks
- Task logistics: Order, number, timing
- Conducting a study
- Tips for study facilitators
- How to interact with participants
- Managing observers
- Analyzing and reporting the findings
- Affinity diagrams
- Priority and severity ratings
- Different report types for different situations
- The politics of usability reports
- Communicating and tracking findings to resolution
- Ethical considerations in usability testing
- How these techniques fit in with other main usability methods
- Paper and low-fidelity prototyping
- Expert reviews
- Field studies
- Participatory design
- Card sorting
- Surveys
- Remote testing
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This tutorial is for anyone who wants to conduct usability tests, or who wants some
background in usability testing before hiring external testers. This session is intended for people who have
either never conducted a usability test or who are relatively new to the discipline.
See Also:
Usability in Practice: 3-Day Intensive Camp (only
offered in Chicago). The Camp covers a broader range of usability methods than this 1-day course.
Instructors
Marieke Obdeyn is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Before joining NN/g,
Obdeyn was an Information Architect in the Digital Media Group at the National Football League, where she worked
on several large-scale website redesign projects. She has also worked as a psychometrician at Massachusetts General
Hospital. Obdeyn holds an M.A. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where she explored the use of
neuroimaging to study human behavior and cognition, and a B.S. from University College Utrecht, in The Netherlands.
Obdeyn is based in Los Angeles, California.
Presenting in Toronto.
Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. Loranger has
consulted with many large, well-known companies in such areas as finance, customer support, intranets,
e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given
keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals
of Web usability. She coauthored the book Prioritizing Web Usability
(New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for Flash-based
applications, investor relations,
“about us” pages,
B2B websites,
location finders, and
teens.
Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division,
where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW
(now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational
applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied
experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
Presenting in San Francisco.
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