User Experience 2008
Chicago
Nov 2-7		 Amsterdam
Nov 16-21

User Testing

  • Chicago: Wednesday, November 5
  • Amsterdam: Wednesday, November 19

Janelle Estes
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

In this session, you’ll learn how to quickly and cheaply run your own user testing sessions:

  • 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 versus 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.

Instructor

photo of Janelle Estes Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Estes began her career as 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 College.