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Nielsen Norman Group Report:

230 Tips and Tricks for Better Usability Testing
 
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Summary

 This report describes a number of tips and tricks learned during many years of practical usability testing. Most of these tips were discovered the hard way: By making mistakes that test participants, mentors or observers have politely told us about. Other tips have come from watching usability professionals or hearing them talk about their testing practices.

The main criteria for including a tip in this collection are:

  • The tip is not included in any of the main textbooks.
  • The tip is included and it is important, but experience shows that it is often disregarded by usability professionals.

Some of the tips explicitly refer to websites. However, almost all of the tips apply equally well for testing software or consumer electronics.

See sample page.

Table of Contents

 41-page report.
  1. Foreword
  2. Introduction
  3. General Attitudes: 24 tips
    • The Politics of Usability
    • The Ethics of Usability Testing
  4. Finding Good Test Participants: 19 tips
    • Re-using Test Participants
  5. Making Sure that Test Participants Show Up: 8 tips
  6. Selecting Good Test Tasks and Scenarios: 9 tips
  7. How To Actually Perform Tests: 29 tips
    • Planning and Preparation
    • Running the Test
    • Debriefing
  8. Communicating Test Results: 8 tips
  9. Reporting Test Results: 32 tips
    • Process
    • Report Format
    • Individual Comments
  10. How To Test on a Minimal Budget: 10 tips
  11. Testing with Experienced Users: 20 tips
  12. Hiring a Usability Professional: 48 tips
    • General Principles
    • Attitudes
    • General Knowledge about Usability
    • Usability Experience
    • Specific Knowledge about Usability
    • Specific Knowledge about Design
    • Specific Knowledge about Usability Testing
    • Communication Skills
  13. International Usability Testing: 14 tips
  14. Assessing the Quality of a Usability Test Firm: 9 tips
  15. References

Who Should Read This Report?
  • Usability specialists who want to improve their skills at conducting user testing.
  • Managers who want to hire usability specialists should read the special section with 48 tips on how to hire.

Methodology improvements can bring huge gains for a relatively small effort. Let's say that one of the tips results in making your user tests 1% more effective. In an organization with ten usability professionals, a 1% improvement corresponds to more than twenty person-days per year - the same as hiring an external contractor for a month.

This report costs 34 cents per tip; if there is even one tip that's new to you and which helps you improve your process, you will have gained many times the price of all the tips.

Our only plea is that you help us continue publishing low-price reports by buying a site license if you will have more than one person read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

Download Report (PDF file, 41 pages) Download Report (from eSellerate)
$79 for the PDF file (41 pages) with a single-user license
$169 for site license allowing you to make copies within your organization

                        
  

See also Related Reports
233 Tips for Recruiting Test Users
More specific and detailed advice on how to recruit the users you will be testing in a usability study and for managing the recruiting process.

Methodology for E-Commerce Usability
Report on how to test e-commerce sites with examples from a major international study of 20 sites. Includes results from pilot testing of the test tasks and the resulting lessons for writing good test tasks.

How to Conduct Usability Evaluations for Accessibility
40 guidelines for testing users with disabilities.
 

See also Related Film
Paper Prototyping: A How-To Video
32 minute DVD. How to get cheap and early test data about your design ideas.

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See also Workshop
Our experienced usability experts will teach your team user testing by taking them through a complete test of your own design, fine-tune your test methodology, and mentor your facilitation skills:

Hands-On Learning-by-Doing Workshop on User Testing

See also Related Tutorial
At our annual usability conference:

course on user testing methodology
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