| Learning the basics of user testing is easy: I have a three-day "learning-by-doing" workshop that teaches user testing by taking a team through a complete test of their design in that three-day period. Going from the basics to knowing everything about user testing is considerably harder, but luckily the methodology is so robust that you can get good results from even a very simple test.
The goal of this report is not to teach the basics of user testing; rather the report assumes that the reader is already familiar with the basics. The goal of the report is to increase the effectiveness of experienced usability professionals.
You may know several of the tips in this report, but you probably don't know all of them. Nobody is perfect, but we can all improve. That's the basic philosophy that made me decide to publish this report more widely than its original status as a handout for the tutorial on "Advanced Usability Testing Methodology" at Nielsen Norman Group's User Experience World Tour.
It was clear from the User Experience World Tour that there is a great interest all over the world in finding ways of improving the outcome of user testing. We visited New York, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Munich, Stockholm, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Sydney. The tutorial on Advanced Usability Testing Methodology was one of the best-attended events of the conference. It was gratifying to experience the uptake of usability methodology around the world and to see that there now are enough experienced usability professionals to allow us to think about how to make usability more effective.
For the last twenty years, we have had to spend an inordinate amount of time on the very first step of getting companies to include any usability activities in their development process. We still need to evangelize this basic concept because most companies are ignorant of usability and design based on the phase of the moon (or the designers' first intuition about what users might need). Better companies have progressed up the usability maturity curve, however, and are now at the stage where they need to reflect on their own methodology and find ways of improving it.
I recommend allocating a few percent of a company's usability resources to activities that do not do anything directly for the bottom line but simply improve the effectiveness of the work you perform the rest of the time. Reading this report is an example of an activity that will help increase the return on investment of all the tests you conduct. 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 contains 230 tips. Not all of them will apply to all organizations. Find the ones that work for you, and I would not be surprised if you end up improving the effectiveness of your usability group by a good deal more than 1%.
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