User Testing
- New York: Sunday, February 26
- Edinburgh: Wednesday, March 21
- San Francisco: Tuesday, April 3
- Amsterdam: Monday, April 23
Marieke McCloskey
Janelle Estes
Full-Day Training Course
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.
Instructors
Marieke McCloskey is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
She works with clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials about user
experience, usability research methods, writing for the Web, Intranet design, and the
psychology of users. McCloskey has conducted usability studies, including eyetracking,
in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
She has been a researcher and co-author of several NN/g reports, including
College Students on the Web and
Intranet Usability Guidelines
Before joining NN/g, McCloskey 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. McCloskey 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. McCloskey is based in Los Angeles, California.
Presenting in New York, Edinburgh, and San Francisco.
Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
She works with clients in a variety of industries and presents regularly about usability methods, email newsletters,
writing for the Web, and the user experience of nonprofit websites. She has been the primary researcher on and
co-author of several NN/g reports, including email newsletters, transactional email messages, donation usability
for non-profit and charity websites, and social media. Prior to joining NN/g, Estes was a research associate on
the Customer Experience team at Forrester Research, where she was involved with many research efforts related to
user experience and user centered design. Additionally, Estes has worked as a user experience consultant with
companies across many industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and
telecommunications. Most recently, Estes worked at Chordiant Software as a Human Factors Engineer in an agile
development environment. Estes holds a BS in Information Design and Corporate Communication, and an MS in Human
Factors in Information Design, both from Bentley University.
Presenting in Amsterdam.
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