Labs/Ubiquity/Usability/Usability Testing/How To: Difference between revisions

This is rough "as hell". It is based on ideas for error proofing usability testing (especially for beginners) that are being tried out on another usability study now. It will be updated as that study proceeds and will go through another rewrite after that study is complete. As such it will have major grammatical errors (errors tense, terms will not be consistent, etc ;) due to the content being copied and pasted and generally mangled. In the meantime, please share your links and resources, comment, and contribute. This is a wiki, not a book!

 

 

Instead of a single pilot study the testing is broken into multiple rounds thatgrow exponentially and become more refined. Each round goes from test to completed deliverable, after which the facilitator (that's you) evaluates the test, the workflow, and the goals of the test and decides what is worth changing and what is not. This prevents unexpected problems from infecting other test sessions, allows for improvements to the workflow, and caps testing to the minimum number of participants.

(1 test with 1-2 participants ''total'')  

(1+ test with 3-6 participants)

The gamma phase is really just a name for when you stop assessing your workflow and testing suite and just rip through test sessions and post production work like a Ninja.

 

Unless you are testing a complex interface (MS Office or an e-commerce website) or you have a demographic quota to fill ''you probably don't need to perform any gamma tests.'' While statistical significance is important the general rule of thumb is to stop testing when you begin to see patterns emerge. When you can sessions become predictable, when you stop finding new errors, etc you have probably run into all the walls users can run into. Stop, fix the product, and start a new test.

This is the most commonly used format for Usability testing. It is more accurately defined as a sudo scientific,where interesting results are gained but there is no variable that changes.

Paper prototyping is the sliced bread of Usability. Sadly, very few practitioners use them. It's best to think of paper prototyping as the step in-between sketching a design and creating a mockup on the computer. It has all the advantages of sketching (cheap, fast to make, easy to change) and helps users open up to criticizing the design.

Part of the reason paper prototyping isn't used is that people think there must be some magic to it, some step they haven't thought about. The whole thing is silly, draw an interface and ask people to "use it." But it really is that simple.

<video type="youtube" id="GrV2SZuRPv0" width="437" height="315" desc="1x Video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrV2SZuRPv0 Original Video]" frame="true" position="center"/>

The only time that paper prototyping isn't very useful is when the interaction is not restricted or response times are important. If you are trying to understand how users interact with a command line (unrestricted input) and that interaction depends on very fast speeds (like auto-suggest) it may be hard to get good information.

And unfortunately, if you have to share your designs to a remote team most people do not give early design prototypes the respect they deserve. And unless you have a touch screen computer, sending the sketches to remote teams can be inconvenient.

Wireframes mockups of varying degrees of functionality that also look good. These are genally used for web posts and pitching ideas.

In order of least [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=PITA PITA] to high PITA.

* Omnigraffle/Viso

* Yahoo Wireframes

* Omnigraffle UI

* Yahoo Wireframes

* Videos?

* Pencil, other Gui Toolkits

 

On the desktop side, there are too many GUI IDE's to list here. Of course we like Mozilla's Prism, XUL, but we STRONGLY caution that you use these as a last resort for early stage experimentation. You can get more information from multiple quick paper prototypes than all the effort spend on a single throw-away GUI prototype.

 

 

Choose a place.

 

Labs skew people's behavior, get the most informal setting you can. This is known as in-field testing and it makes people feel more comfortable. Coffee shops, corporate lunchrooms, or university cafeteria are all great places with plenty of people.

 

 

Choose a person.

 

 

However you recruit participants follow these guidelines and you will get much better interactions:

 

 

 

 

Recruit your army.

 

For Beta tests<link> immediate friends and family are off limits, although their friends are not. Your history and interaction with them skews the test too far. Your friends and family in particular don't want to hurt your feelings.

 

 

If you ''do'' have a budget post on craigslist. A busy cafe or company lunchroom offer the largest pool of potential testers. If that is not an option work whatever social networks you have, be that Facebook, emailing, or just asking around.

Donuts, company merchandise, etc are cheap ways of paying your participants. Not paying them makes for even better test, but it does require more effort socially. <link>

If you are going to collect personal information (be that age, contact info, or a video capture) you must get some sort of recordable evidence that they know what is going to happen with their information. If you are recording the session the easiest thing is for the participant to record their consent on tape. That way user can remain anonymous (their name is not required and can be seperated from the video) but still verifiable (if there is a dispute after the fact you play the recording).

 

 

In the same vein, copyright can't protect against embarrassing your users. Fair use mean that anyone can remix your video and make a parody of your poor test participant. If you do include video, make the video as small as possible, reduce the opacity to 50%, and overlay a product logo for good measure.

 

 

 

If you are sharing the data publicly (especially personally identifiable information) some sort of consent is a very good idea. While a written consent form an audio or visual consent form is easier to manage and can't be lost as they are embedded in the information itself. The standard [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL IANAL] applies, nor has the following been vetted by a real lawyer but you can see [http://www.viddler.com/explore/indolering/videos/7/ examples] of our consent process from previous testing. This consent process consistent to other Usability professionals and the Psychological research field in general.

 

 

Spreadsheets are the easiest, fastest, and most flexible way of tracking your data. After a recording session immediately watch video and record each error. Doing this immediately cuts down on the tedious work when writing your final report and allows you to immediately compare errors from each session. In the next session you will be able to automatically assign a mistake to a specific category, instead of trying to unify all the different sessions at the end.

 

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