Tips For Effective Usability Testing In India

An introduction to usability testing and 15 tips for effective usability testing in India. Created and presented by Abhay Rautela at the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, India during the second day of Bar Camp Delhi 6.

Rautela, Abhay. SlideShare (2009). Presentations>Usability>Testing>India

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

Fifteen Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India

An Introduction to Usability Testing and Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India. Created and presented by Abhay Rautela at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, India at Bar Camp Delhi 6

Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2009). Presentations>Usability>Testing>India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discount Usability: 20 Years

Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

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

Usability Testing Demystified

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

The Myth of Usability Testing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Usability Over Time: Longitudinal Research Studies

User research focused on single experiences with a feature or workflow uncovers different problems and issues than longitudinal research.

Sy, Desirée. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

Design Values: Validated Data over Expert Opinion

A few years ago, some of my colleagues decided to run a first-experience study on one of our software packages. The purpose of such a study is to gain an understanding of what our users go through in their first hour of use. What do they experience? Where do they get stuck? How far can they get in the software? What are their learning strategies? As a side experiment, my colleagues asked several experts in the company for their expert opinion as to what problems users would run into, and compiled them into a list. (These experts included the software designers, domain experts, and the people who trained users on the software.) Then my colleagues ran their study, observing sixteen people using this software for the first time, and made a list of the problems that users actually ran into. The result? There was not one common item on the two lists.

Schrag, John. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing

Usability Testing on a Budget 

In this Ask UXmatters column—which is the second in a three-part series of columns focusing on usability—our experts discuss how to conduct usability testing with limited funding.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing

Usability Testing Versus Expert Reviews 

In this Ask UXmatters column—which is the first in a series of three columns focusing on usability—our experts discuss the use of usability testing versus expert reviews.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Heuristic Evaluation

Eyetracking: Is It Worth It? 

It is easy to get excited about eyetracking. Seeing where people look while using your Web site, Web application, or software product sounds like an opportunity to get amazing insights into their user experience. But eyetracking is expensive and requires extra effort and specialized knowledge. The heat maps and other visualizations certainly look impressive, but what can you really learn from them? After using eyetracking for the first time, many find that it is not easy to know how to analyze the visualizations and make conclusions from them. Does eyetracking really provide any additional insights you would not have discovered anyway through traditional usability testing? Does the value of eyetracking outweigh its limitations? This article will discuss and answer these questions.

Ross, Jim. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>Eye Tracking