This book digs into how to make products user-friendly, with guidelines on testing, factors that limit usability, choosing and training test moderators, collecting and reviewing data, reporting results and making recommendations, user-centered design principles and practices, and much more.

Handbook of Usability Testing

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Preface

What Makes Something Usable?

The term usability testing is often used rather indiscriminately to refer to any technique used to evaluate a product or system. Many times it is obvious that the speaker is referring to one of the other techniques discussed in Chapter 1. Throughout this book we use the term usability testing to refer to a process that employs people as testing participants who are representative of the target audience to evaluate the degree to which a product meets specific usability criteria. This inclusion of representative users eliminates labeling as usability testing such techniques as expert evaluations, walk-throughs, and the like that do not require representative users as part of the process.

What Is Usability Testing?

Some type of usability testing fits into every phase of a development lifecycle. The type of testing is distinguished by the research questions asked, the state of the completeness of the product, and the time available for implementing solutions to problems revealed in testing. This chapter outlines four types of tests that fit into the general phases that any product development cycle goes though (see Figure 3.1).

When Should You Test?

The role of the test moderator or test administrator is the most critical of all the test team members, presuming that you even have the luxury of a test team. In fact, the moderator is the one team member that you absolutely must have in order to conduct the test. The moderator is ultimately responsible for all preparations including test materials, participant arrangements, and coordination of the efforts of other members of the test team.

Skills for Test Moderators

The test plan is the foundation for the entire test. It addresses the how, when, where, who, why, and what of your usability test. Under the sometimes unrelenting time pressure of project deadlines, there could be a tendency to forgo writing a detailed test plan. Perhaps, feeling that you have a good idea of what you would like to test in your head, you decide not to bother writing it down. This informal approach is a mistake, and it invariably will come back to haunt you.

Develop the Test Plan

For many of those contemplating the implementation of a usability testing program, the discipline has become synonymous with a high-powered, well-appointed, well-equipped, expensive laboratory. For some organizations, the usability lab (and by that we mean the physical plant) has become more prominent and more important than the testing process itself. Some organizations, in their zeal to impress customers and competitors alike with their commitment to usability, have created awe-inspiring palaces of high-tech wizardry prior to laying the foundation for an ongoing testing program . Not realizing that instituting a program of user-centered design requires a significant shift in the culture of the organization, these organizations have put the proverbial cart before the horse, in their attempt to create instant programs, rather than building programs over time.

Set Up a Testing Environment

The selection and acquisition of participants whose background and abilities are representative of your product's intended user is a crucial element of the testing process. After all, your test results will only be valid if the people who participate are typical users of the product, or as close to that criterion as possible. If you test with the “wrong” people, it does not matter how much effort you put into the rest of the test preparation. Your results will be questionable and of limited value.

Find and Select Participants

One of the more labor-intensive activities required to conduct a usability test is developing the test materials that will be used to communicate with the participants, collect the data, and satisfy legal requirements. It is important to develop all required test materials well in advance of the time you need them. Apart from the obvious benefit of not having to scurry around at the last minute, developing materials early on helps to explicitly structure and organize the test. In fact, if you have difficulty developing one particular type of test material, this can be a sign that there are flaws in your test objectives and test design.

Prepare Test Materials

Having completed the basic groundwork and preparation for your usability test, you are almost ready to begin testing. While there exists an almost endless variety of sophisticated and esoteric tests one might conduct (from a test comprising a single participant and lasting several days to a fully automated test with hundreds or perhaps thousands of participants), in this chapter we focus on the guidelines and activities for conducting the classic “one-on-one” test. This “typical” test consists of four to ten participants, each of whom is observed and questioned individually by a test moderator seated in the same room. This method will work for any of the four types of tests discussed in Chapter 3: exploratory, assessment, validation, or comparison. The main difference is the types of objectives pursued, that is, more conceptual for an exploratory test, and more behavior oriented for assessment and validation tests. The other major difference is the amount of interaction between participant and test moderator. The early exploratory tests will have much interaction. The later validation test will have much less interaction, because the objective is measurement against a standard.

Conduct the Test Sessions

Debriefing refers to exploring and reviewing the participant's actions during the performance portion of a usability test. When first sitting down to organize this book, Jeff was not sure whether to assign debriefing to its own stage of testing or to combine it with the previous stage of conducting the test. After all, one could argue that debriefing is really an extension of the testing process. Participants perform some tasks, and you interview them either in phases or after the entire test.

Debrief the Participant and Observers

Finally. You have completed the testing and are now ready to dive in and transform a wealth of data into recommendations for improvement. Typically, the analysis of data falls into two distinct processes with two different deliverables:

Analyze Data and Observations

As discussed in Chapter 11, there are four major steps involved in analyzing test data and developing recommendations. These are:

Report Findings and Recommendations

Having previously described the basic method for conducting a usability test, with one participant and one test moderator, this chapter describes some variations of that technique. It discusses some common variations, with tips about implementing them, such as testing with special populations, working with prototypes, and techniques for conducting sessions inside and outside a lab, including remote and automated testing. Ultimately, your testing methodology is limited only by your imagination and the types of questions you need to have answered in testing. We include many references to books and articles that expand on the techniques in this chapter on the web site that accompanies this book: www.wiley.com/go/usabilitytesting .

Variations on the Basic Method

Up to this point, we have covered the technical aspects of planning, designing, conducting, and reporting the results of a usability test in great detail. We have also placed usability testing within the context of a user-centered approach to product development. In this final chapter, let's revisit the larger picture and discuss how to expand the influence of user-centered design and user experience design within an organization. These suggestions are primarily intended for an individual who has been given (or would like to take) primary responsibility for usability within his or her organization, with minimal formal training in user-centered design.

Expanding from Usability Testing to Designing the User Experience

When the first edition of this book was published, we expected that automated usability evaluations would be built directly into software products. These evaluations would provide feedback about customer usage, preferences, and difficulties, gathered more quickly and on a much larger scale than ever before. This hasn't happened the way Jeff envisioned it, but analytics and automated usability testing of web sites and web applications come close.

Handbook of Usability Testing

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Jeff Rubin

Dana Chisnell

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Handbook of Usability Testing