#33244
Usability Testing: Revisiting Informed Consent Procedures for Testing Internet Sites 
This paper explores issues of professional, ethical conduct in usability testing centering around the concept of 'informed consent'. Previous work on informed consent has been in homogeneous geographic locations. With Internet sites being developed at a prodigious rate, these procedures need to be revisited for their applicability to heterogeneous locations, in terms of culture, business practice, language and legal requirements. Some previously valued principles might now be considered discretionary, that is their applicability has situational specificity. Other principles are mandatory.
Burmeister, Oliver K. ACM (2000). Articles>Usability>Testing>Ethics
#33245
Videotape has become one of the CHI community's mostuseful technologies: it allows us to analyze users' interactions with computers,prototype new interfaces, and present the results of our research andtechnical innovations to others. But video is a double-edged sword. It isoften misused, however unintentionally. How can we use it well, without compromising our integrity? This paper presents actual examples of questionable videotaping practices. Next, it explains why we cannot simply borrow ethical guidelines from otherprofessions. It concludes with a proposal for developing usable ethical guidelines for the capture, analysis andpresentation of video.
Mackay, Wendy E. ACM SIGCHI (1995). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Usability>Testing
#33295
Noddys Guide to Usability Testing and Gaming 
Discusses how usability testing can be useful at all stages of games development.
#33311
Sometimes we need to take a step back to ensure that our motivations are in the right place. It can be easy to forget that, when people participate in our studies, they are our partners. Dana Chisnell has taken the time to examine these attitudes and help us understand how to avoid falling into such traps.
Chisnell, Dana E. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Usability>Testing
#33666
Quick Turnaround Usability Testing, Part II
The beauty of the whiteboard method is that your report becomes simply a summary of what you have already written on the whiteboard, including completion metrics, findings, and recommendations that have been vetted by key stakeholders.
Nuschke, Paul. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#33958
In today’s financial climate, organisations are trying to cut costs. This has led to lots of new and innovative cost-cutting usability techniques springing up. Some of them are ingenious, but not every cost saving measure is a good idea. One technique that is becoming popular with some is focus group usability testing. I recommend that you avoid this technique completely. I’ll try to explain why.
Hamill, David. Good Usability (2008). Articles>Usability>Testing>Focus Groups
#34460
The Benefits of Viewing User Tests
The benefits of user testing have long been established. It is still important however to try and maximise these benefits. One way in which this can be done is by viewing the user test yourself.
Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#34502
Tips for Effective DIY Participant Recruitment for Usability Testing
In case you are not using the services of a professional recruitment agency, or do not have an internal recruitment team that can help you acquire participants for usability tests, here are some tips to help you begin with finding those participants successfully.
Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing
#34536
Five Reasons Why a Digital Agency Should Take Usability Seriously
Many digital agencies are now talking about usability and including it in their offering, but few are incorporating into their everyday process. Here are some reasons why agencies should think seriously about integrating usability and usability testing into their offering.
Experience Solutions (2009). Articles>Consulting>Usability>Testing
#34685
Focus Groups vs. Usability Testing: What, When and Why?
Focus groups and usability testing are two very useful but very different user research disciplines. This article will look at the difference between focus groups and usability testing, the pros and cons of each and when in the development process you should use them.
Gray, Alistair. Webcredible (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Focus Groups
#34875
Extremely Rapid Usability Testing
The trade show booth on the exhibit floor of a conference is traditionally used for company representatives to sell their products and services. However, the trade booth environment also creates an opportunity, for it can give the development team easy access to many varied participants for usability testing. The question is can we adapt usability testing methods to work in such an environment? Extremely rapid usability testing (ERUT) does just this, where we deploy a combination of questionnaires, interviews, storyboarding, co-discovery, and usability testing in a trade show booth environment. We illustrate ERUT in actual use during a busy photographic trade show. It proved effective for actively gathering real-world user feedback in a rapid paced environment where time is of the essence.
Pawson, Mark and Saul Greenberg. Journal of Usability Studies (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#34938
Why "How Many Users" is Just the Wrong Question
Every day in offices around the world usability professionals ask and are asked this question: How many users do we need for our usability test? Its an important question. We want to find most of and the most severe problems. So, we need to test enough people. But usability testing is so expensive, and the cost of testing increases with each participant. So, we don't want to test too many, either.
Straub, Kathleen. UI Design Newsletter (2007). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#34943
Getting the Right Design and the Design Right: Testing Many Is Better Than One
We present a study comparing usability testing of a single interface versus three functionally equivalent but stylistically distinct designs. We found that when presented with a single design, users give significantly higher ratings and were more reluctant to criticize than when presented with the same design in a group of three. Our results imply that by presenting users with alternative design solutions, subjective ratings are less prone to inflation and give rise to more and stronger criticisms when appropriate. Contrary to our expectations, our results also suggest that usability testing by itself, even when multiple designs are presented, is not an effective vehicle for soliciting constructive suggestions about how to improve the design from end users. It is a means to identify problems, not provide solutions.
Tohidi, Maryam, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker and Abigail Sellen. CHI 2006 Proceedings (2006). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#34954
Usability Testing: A Reality Show?
In a typical on-camera usability test, in the lab environment, we ask the subjects to perform certain tasks using the product. Such tests are time-bound and follow strict procedures in terms of user profiling, briefing, task descriptions, actual performance and think aloud exercise, screen capturing (in case of software), etc. You do the video recording of usability test to observe the user performance, their response and behavior. All this is perfectly fine. Coming back to certain observations from the Big Boss reality show. I found that the participants of Big Boss have evolved through distinct psychological stages, which are sequentially progressive.
Katre, Dinesh S. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>Usability>Testing
#35237
Low-Budget Prototyping Techniques
We believe user research is too important to give up. So we have to run tests quickly and cheaply for our clients to accept the cost - and we have to clearly show how it brings value. Because of this, we’ve developed a toolbox of quick, cheap UX research techniques. In this article, we’ll talk about one technique known as fast prototyping, and how we effectively used it in a recent project for Vodafone Ireland.
Barros, Belén, Colin Bentley and Elizabeth McGuane. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Usability>Prototyping>Testing
#35266
Six-Step Process for Planning a User Test
Preparing for usability testing requires a surprisingly large amount of planning. Here are the 6 key steps you should go through to get ready.
Warsi, Abid. Webcredible (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#35308
#35317
Moderating with Multiple Personalities: Three Roles for Facilitating Usability Tests
Usability tests are a core design tool and, when done well, they deliver tremendous insights to the team. However, when a usability test is done poorly, it can be a disaster for everyone involved. An important key to their success is the work of a great moderator.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods
#35352
There seems to be this idea going around that usability testing is bad, or that the cool kids don’t do it. That it’s old skool. That designers don’t need to do it. What if I told you that usability testing is the hottest thing in experience design research? Every time a person has a great experience with a website, a web app, a gadget, or a service, it’s because a design team made excellent decisions about both design and implementation—decisions based on data about how people use designs. And how can you get that data? Usability testing.
Chisnell, Dana E. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>User Experience
#35404
Usability evaluations are good for many things, but determining a team's priorities is not one of them. The Molich experiment proves a single usability team can't discover all or even most major problems on a site. But usability testing does have value as a shock treatment, trust builder, and part of a triangulation process. Test for the right reasons and achieve a positive outcome.
Hoekman, Robert, Jr. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing
#35446
Studying Web Pages Using Eye Tracking
Eye tracking has been investigated and 'toyed with' for many years by researchers and commercial usability professionals. Many new techniques and therefore interesting and powerful results are now available.
Ewing, Kirk. Scribd (2005). Articles>Usability>Testing>Eye Tracking
#35447
The Hunt for Usability: Tracking Eye Movements
Incorporation of eye position recording into product usability evaluation can provide insights into human-computer interaction that are not available from traditional usability testing methods. We present here some thoughts on this topic which arose primarily from a CHI 99 workshop. This workshop brought together human-computer interaction designers, eye movement researchers and usability testing specialists for a discussion about how to extract information about product usability from users’ eye movements.
Karn, Keith S., Steve Ellis, and Cornell Juliano. SIGCHI Bulletin (2000). Articles>Usability>Testing>Eye Tracking
#35575
Usability Testing: It's not a Myth
Basically, terrible testing yields terrible results, and since the goal of the comparative usability tests was to find best practices, some teams in those tests did not follow best practices and thus did not get good results. In other words, the fact that they did not get good results is not an inherent problem with usability tests; it’s a direct result of them doing a poor job.
ignore the code (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing
#35591
Designing the User Experience at Autodesk: A Case Study in Large-Application Usability Benchmarking
As a user researcher with a primarily qualitative background, I have to confess that when I was asked to conduct a usability benchmark study on AutoCAD, I was not exactly jumping out of my chair. Frankly, I was wary of the quantitative emphasis of the method and the proposal to reduce the whole user experience down to a single number. I was also more than slightly nervous about designing a benchmark study for a product as complex as AutoCAD.
Dawe, Melissa. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Case Studies
#35593
Usability Testing with User Proxies: When is "Close" Close Enough?
How can we designers get valid feedback from more design iterations in less time? One bottleneck in the design flow is finding a steady stream of usability testers. Between the extremes of the perfect (an actual user, on site) and the unacceptable (the developer who's coding the feature), lies the grey zone of user proxies. Can you use internal employees with relevant domain knowledge to usability test your products, and still get valid data?
Sy, Desirée. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Graphic Design>Usability>Testing
