User Testing
- New York: Tuesday, March 23
- London: Sunday, May 16
- San Francisco: Tuesday, June 15
- Toronto: Monday, August 9
Celeste Buckhalter
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.
Instructor
Celeste Buckhalter is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
Prior to joining NN/g, Buckhalter worked as a Usability Analyst for Delta Air Lines. At Delta, she conducted
user research and usability studies for the kiosk interface redesign and the airline’s website. Buckhalter
previously worked as a music educator within the public schools, where she conducted action research in the
classroom. Buckhalter earned an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology
and a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from the University of Southern Mississippi.
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