Articles and resources tagged “usability testing”

Usability task scenarios: The beating heart of a usability test

Usability tests are unique. We ask people to do real tasks with the system and watch. As the person completes the task, we watch their behaviour and listen to their stream-of-consciousness narrative. But what makes a good usability task scenario?

The future of UX research is automated, and that's a problem

If you compare the UX research methods we use today with the methods we used 16 years ago, something interesting emerges. We see that UX research is becoming increasingly remote and increasingly unmoderated. In other words, we're moving to a world where UX research is becoming automated. We can learn a lot from automated research. But it comes at the price of understanding our users.

Repeat after me: Preference testing is not A/B Testing

Researchers sometimes ask participants which of two alternative designs they prefer. The data from these studies comprise opinions that have little predictive value. In contrast, multivariate A/B testing involves target users doing real tasks. The data from these studies comprise behavioural observations that predict real-world behaviour.

Anatomy of a user research consent form

We've always treated the informed consent process seriously and we have always gained explicit consent from people that take part in our field visits and usability tests. Although I think we do a good job of gaining consent, the advent of GDPR gave us an opportunity to review what we do. We were interested if there was a way we could improve our practice.

How to spend your first month in a UX research role (and stay friends with your new work colleagues)

When you start a new job as a user researcher, you need to both charm your work colleagues (so they take action on your future research findings) and challenge them (so they become more user centred). How can you best achieve this in your first 4 weeks in a new job?

Why you don't need a representative sample in your user research

Engaging a representative sample of participants in user research sounds like a good idea but it is flawed. It requires lots of participants, does not work in an agile development environment, stifles innovation and reduces your chances of finding problems in small sample usability tests. When combined with iterative design, theoretical sampling (where theory and data collection move hand in hand) provides a more practical alternative.

The User Researcher's Field Guide to Psychology

When planning user research studies, there are four fundamental principles from psychology that user researchers must know. These are: your users do not think like you think; your users don't have good insight into the reasons for their behaviour; the best predictor of your users' future behaviour is their past behaviour; and your users' behaviour depends on context.

Minting new design ideas from usability test data

A usability test provides us with a host of observations describing how people interact with a product or service. What it doesn't provide is design solutions. To generate useful design solutions we need to first generate insights to identify the underlying problems and then create testable hypotheses to fix their cause.

User experience research and strength of evidence

The concept of strength of evidence plays an important role in all fields of research, but is seldom discussed in the context of user research. We take a closer look at what it means for user experience research, and suggest a taxonomy of research methods based on the strength of the data they return.

How to find more usability problems with fewer users

A common myth in usability testing goes like this: '5 participants are all you need to get 85% of the usability problems.' Understanding why this is a myth helps us generate ideas to help us increase the number of problems we find in a usability test.

10 findings from psychology that every user researcher should know

A knowledge of psychology can help user researchers be more effective when they plan research, make observations, analyse data and present the results.

Is Usability a Science?

Recently, Todd Zazelenchuk, David Travis and I met up at our favourite watering hole in Staffordshire. As is often the case we stumbled into a discussion about usability, this time mulling over the question of whether usability is or is not a science. It turned out to be a slightly more challenging question than we had expected. Cut to the pub—

The two questions we answer with user research

Fundamentally, all user research answers one of two questions: (a) Who are our users and what are they trying to do? (b) Can people use the thing we've designed to solve their problem? You answer the first question with a field visit and you answer the second question with a usability test.

What user researchers ought to know about informed consent

Gaining informed consent is a cornerstone of the social sciences. But it is sometimes poorly practiced by user researchers. They fail to explain consent properly. They mix up the consent form with a non-disclosure agreement. And they mix up the consent form with the incentive. Improving the way you get consent will also improve the data you collect because participants can be more open and because it makes user researchers more empathic.

Measuring Usability With The System Usability Scale (SUS)

2 May, 2016 - It is the 30th anniversary of the creation of the most used questionnaire for measuring perceptions of usability. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was released into this world by John Brooke in 1986. It has become an industry standard with references in over 600 publications.

5 reasons why your first user research activity should be a usability test

A usability test is the wrong research method when you want to discover if there's a real user need for your product; when you want to understand the environment where your system is used; and when you want to find out how people use your product in their daily lives. So why do I almost always recommend a usability test as a team's first user research activity?

Keeping Yourself out of the Story: Controlling Experimenter Effects

We take a look at some subtle yet pervasive experimenter effects, at ways they can bias the outcome of a design experiment, and at what we can do to control their influence.

The 4 mistakes you’ll make as a usability test moderator

What are the most common mistakes that test moderators make? I’ve observed usability tests moderated by consultants, in-house researchers, junior user researchers and experienced practitioners and there are some common mistakes I come across time and again. These mistakes are like a rite of passage on the route to becoming a user researcher, but even experienced practitioners aren’t immune from making them.

The 3 lenses of usability evaluation

Over the last few months, I've worked with three clients who have each adopted a different approach to usability evaluation. These approaches are like different lenses used to observe the customer experience. No single approach is adequate on its own, but in combination the three approaches form a powerful strategy.

The 7 Deadly Sins of User Research

Most companies would claim to design products and services that are simple to use. But when you ask customers to actually use these products and services, they often find them far from simple. Why is there a disconnect between what organisations think of as "simple" and what users actually experience?

5 provocative views on usability testing

This month, I had the pleasure of being on a panel on usability testing at the UXPA with Rolf Mohlich, Steve Krug, and Jakob Biesterfeldt. I was asked to take a deliberately provocative view on 5 issues in usability testing. In this article, I'll argue that these 5 common beliefs about usability testing are false.

How to Experiment

With the advent of Lean UX — a kind of science of design — the ability to design and conduct an experiment should now be an important part of every designer’s skill set. But what is a design experiment? How do you develop an experiment? And how can you trust the results?

A little known factor that could have a big effect on your next usability test

Usability testing is widely accepted as the de facto method for finding usability problems with a user interface. However, test sessions can suffer from a significant ‘observer effect’. This article describes some of the evidence for the observer effect along with some suggestions for ameliorating it.

The UX debrief: A tale of two meetings

UX debrief meetings are sometimes viewed as little more than a way to wrap-up a project. This is a mistake. A UX debrief meeting can accomplish much more than just tie a bow on the project. But it's easier to get a debrief meeting wrong than it is to get it right — as I painfully discovered during the debrief meeting from hell.

The 1-page usability test plan

The Usability Test Plan is a critical document to help you manage and organise a usability test. But it can sometimes appear too documentation-heavy in agile environments. What would a usability test plan look like if it was re-envisioned as a single page?

What Gordon Ramsay can teach us about giving feedback to design teams

The Michelin-starred chef and restaurant troubleshooter can teach us a thing or two about providing design criticism, although some of it you may wish to avoid.

My place or yours? How to decide where to run your next usability test

The most common types of usability test are remote usability tests, corporate lab-based tests, contextual usability tests and rented facility tests. What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of these different approaches to usability testing and how should you choose between them?

The usability error you don't know you're making

Failing to speak the user's language is an easy trap to fall into because you may not know the user's vocabulary and because technical terms often become second nature to the design team. As with much of user centred design, the secret lies in getting closer to your users so you can empathise with them.

Adapting your usability testing practise for mobile

There's no better way to get feedback on the usability of your mobile app than by running a usability test. Although the process is the same as when testing a desktop app, there are quite a few differences in the details. Adjust your test to take account of these differences and you'll be better placed to identify the real problems that real users will have with your app when used in an authentic context.

"I want to speak to my users but they don't want to speak to me"

Making user experience happen within an organisation requires development teams to start involving users. This can be a difficult prospect for teams who have not engaged with users in the past. Here are 10 suggestions to help you make that first all-important contact with users.

2 kinds of usability test

There are two different types of usability test and each has different aims. Which test you choose will have implications for the number of participants you test, the methodology you use and the way you log, analyse and present the data.

Dealing with difficult usability test participants

A common concern of people running usability tests is that sooner or later they’ll run into a difficult participant. Who are these difficult characters and how can we prevent them from being a problem?

The Wizard of Oz guide to usability testing mobile prototypes

It's easy to create a mobile prototype on a desktop computer. What's not quite so easy is to usability test the prototype and still allow the participant to use mobile interaction gestures like long presses and two finger pinches. We can overcome this obstacle by combining Axure's mutually exclusive non-conditional cases with Wizard of Oz usability testing.

Lean ways to test your new business idea

In ‘The Lean Startup’, Eric Ries describes a design process to help manage risk when developing new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This article describes three established user experience techniques we can use to support this design process: narrative storyboarding; paper prototyping; and the Wizard of Oz.

20 things you can do this year to improve your user’s experience

The new year is as good a time as any to review and improve the way you work. With a good user experience now widely seen as the key attribute of many high-tech products, it makes sense to review your own products to see how you can give them that user experience edge. Here are 20 quick, simple and virtually free ideas you can apply in 2012.

How to manage design projects with user experience metrics

User experience metrics are measures that help you assess how your design stacks up against the needs of your customers and the needs of your business. Lab-based methods of collecting UX metrics are too slow and expensive to be part of most design projects, especially those using agile methodologies. But with online usability testing tools, regular user experience benchmarking is now cheap and quick to carry out.

Making usability metrics count

In spite of a proliferation of books, articles and blogs explaining how to measure usability, few companies seem to put their usability metrics to good use. In this article we show how you can link the numbers from usability tests to the numbers that steer business decisions — and in the process, influence your company's business.

4 forgotten principles of usability testing

Many usability tests are worthless. Researchers recruit the wrong kind of participants, test the wrong kind of tasks, put too much weight on people's opinions, and expect participants to generate design solutions.

Creating usability test tasks that really motivate users

The magic of usability tests is that you get to see what people actually do with a system (rather than what they say they do). This gives you great insights into how people behave and how to improve your design. But if your tasks lack realism you'll find that people just go through the motions and don't engage with the test — reducing the credibility of your results. Here are 6 ways to captivate participants with great test tasks.

Creative ways to solve usability problems

It's sometimes said that usability professionals are good at finding problems, but not quite as good at coming up with creative solutions. This article describes a creativity technique called SCAMPER that will help you effortlessly generate dozens of design solutions to any usability problem you identify.

Log usability tests like a pro

Observing a usability test seems simple but it's easy to lose focus during a session and record only the dramatic or obvious usability problems. As you watch the test, you should make minute-by-minute observations of the participant's behaviour as single letter codes. Datalogging ensures you note all behaviours, not just the ones that stand out, and provides all you need to quickly create a list of usability issues you can pass to the design team. This article includes a macro-free Excel spreadsheet you can use to timestamp your observations.

Usability testing with hard-to-find participants

For most products, it's easy to track down participants for a usability test. But there are some products where end-users are difficult to find and recruit. For these products, it's better to use surrogate users as a proxy for genuine users than not to usability test at all, but you must manage the risks appropriately.

How to prioritise usability problems

A typical usability test may return over 100 usability issues. How can you prioritise the issues so that the development team know which ones are the most serious? By asking just 3 questions of any usability problem, we are able to classify its severity as low, medium, serious or critical.

Usability Test Moderation: The Comic

If you've been tasked with running a usability test, then you'll love this instructional guide. Aimed at people about to moderate their first usability test, this free graphic instruction guide covers the essential techniques you'll need to moderate a usability test.

What every usability test moderator ought to know about good listening

Moderation seems effortless but there's a lot more to good listening than opening your ears. Here are 15 suggestions to improve your own listening skills.

How to create a usability test highlights video you can be proud of

There's no shortage of software that will record videos from usability tests, but how do you put the clips together in a way that will convince management and the design team to take action on your results? Our solution is to use the rule of 5: Create 5 separate highlights videos each focusing on one usability issue, with each issue comprising 5 clips and with each video lasting 5 minutes or less.

Creating a usability dashboard

We're often told that senior managers don't have the time to read a detailed report describing the findings from a usability test. This means our thoroughly argued, carefully analysed and clearly presented 60-page report could have no effect on improving the product or changing the culture. How can we better engage managers with our data?

Writing the perfect participant screener

"Know thy user" is the first principle of usability, so it's important that you involve the right kind of people in your usability study. These 8 tips for screening participants will show you how to recruit articulate, representative users for your research, quickly filter out the people you don't want and help you avoid the dreaded "no show".

Credit-Crunch Usability: 10 ways to maximise your usability budget

Being frugal during economic hard times is good business practice. So how can you squeeze your usability budget and still deliver great insights? These 10 suggestions for streamlining your usability efforts explode the myth that usability is expensive and time-consuming.

How to run an unmoderated usability test

In an unmoderated usability test, a computer automates the process of administering a usability test. This means you can test with much larger samples than with a conventional test, calculate reliable measures of usability and feel confident that you're capturing your customer's context of use.

Usability Test Plan Toolkit

This eBook contains all you need to make sure that you're fully prepared for your next usability test. The document includes easy to customise usability test forms, such as screeners, a discussion guide, questionnaires and data logging sheets.

Measuring the usability of everyday products

ISO have released a new standard for measuring the usability of every day products, like ticket machines, mobile phones and digital cameras. This standard, ISO 20282, includes test methods for quantifying the usability of consumer products to ensure they meet a pre-defined quality level. This development is exciting because the standard's focus on usability measurement reflects a sea change in the evolving practice of usability. In the old world, usability specialists just found usability problems with a design. In the new world, usability specialists also answer the question: "How usable is this design?"

Data collection for usability research

How should you go about collecting data in usability tests? This article examines the data collection process in usability studies and describes some popular data logging solutions. Since most of these tools are expensive, we show you how you can use Microsoft Excel with Visual Basic macros to collect the data.

Measuring satisfaction: Beyond the usability questionnaire

Most usability tests culminate with a short questionnaire that asks the participant to rate, usually on a 5- or 7-point scale, various characteristics of the system. Experience shows that participants are reluctant to be critical of a system, no matter how difficult they found the tasks. This article describes a guided interview technique that overcomes this problem based on a word list of over 100 adjectives. We also include a spreadsheet to generate and randomise the word list.

Measuring usability with the Common Industry Format (CIF)

Are you a CIO, purchasing officer, or IT manager, about to invest in productivity software for your company? If you are, here's a question you should ask your supplier before you sign on the dotted line: "Just how usable is this product?" Astonishingly, most companies won't be able to answer, and those that try will answer the question only vaguely. But now help is at hand. It's called CIF. And it's about to change the game.

Paper Prototyping with Morae

Morae makes it easy to log usability tests, create video highlights and allow observers to view a test in progress. But Morae is designed to support usability tests of software, not paper prototypes. This how-to article shows you how to exploit the full functionality of Morae when carrying out a paper prototype test.

Why you shouldn't ask “Why?” in a usability test

This year marks an important anniversary for people who moderate usability tests. In a classic study carried out exactly 30 years ago, psychologists showed that people are very poor at explaining the reasons behind their choices. This is why usability tests focus on what people do, not on what people say. So why do so many usability test moderators continue to ask participants, "Why"?

Standards update: Usability test reporting

It's a truism that even a bad usability test will help improve your software. But the findings from different usability tests are notoriously difficult to compare. This makes it difficult to track usability improvements or to see how you compare against an earlier product. A new international standard looks set to solve this problem.

Usability test data

People often throw around the terms "objective" and "subjective" when talking about the results of a usability test. These terms are frequently equated with the statistical terms "quantitative" and "qualitative". The analogy is false, and this misunderstanding can have consequences for the interpretations and conclusions of usability tests.

Red route usability

Important roads in London are known as 'red routes' and Transport for London do everything in their power to make sure passenger journeys on these routes are completed as smoothly and quickly as possible. Define the red routes for your web site and you'll be able to identify and eliminate any usability obstacles on the key user journeys.

Usability test datalogger

This Excel spreadsheet allows you to measure task completion rates, time-on-task, analyse questionnaire data, and summarise participant comments. Latest version just released!

Checkpoints for reviewing usability test reports

Usability practitioners are called on, not only to conduct many research studies during their careers, but also to read, review, and advise on usability studies that have been conducted and reported by others. The ability to critically review the research of others, and to help stakeholders weigh up the merits or shortcomings of research data and conclusions, is an extremely valuable skill. These checkpoints will help you ensure your review covers the key issues.

Discount usability: time to push back the pendulum?

Discount usability techniques are a great way to eradicate usability problems. But they can never answer the question, "How usable is this system?" We blow the dust off some techniques commonly used in the early days of usability testing to see if they can provide an answer.

The A-Z of Usability

Rather than create yet another definition of usability, we decided to take a different approach and work through the alphabet, picking one word for each letter to capture the flavour of the field. So we proudly present the A-Z of usability — or usability in 26 words.



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