Clicks & Notes

SitePoint - Not The Usual Suspects: How To Recruit Usability Test Participants

• consider the following when deciding who to recruit:
  • Who was the project designed for?
  • Is there any special equipment, knowledge, or background necessary to appreciate it?
  • How do you want the user to benefit from your site or application?
• be sure to include people who fit both the current and desired profile of typical site users
• sampling techniques for finding users:
  • random – entails defining a targeted population of users
  • quota – recruit ‘X’ number of users who meet certain criteria
  • opportunity – “simply position yourself somewhere you are likely to find users who fit your desired criteria, and take your sample from people who are available at the time”
  • snowball – find one or two key people who fit the profile you want and ask them to recommend more
• (via Column Two)

Good Experience - Four Words to Improve User Research

• the four words are: “Don’t define tasks beforehand.“
• instead, start by interviewing the user – get an idea of how they relate to and use a product or website; ask them to cite a example of something they’ve done or plan to do
• then get them to perform the task they just described to you
• doing it this way means that you won’t be guessing – perhaps incorrectly – how your customers really use the site or product; your tests won’t be skewed toward some hypothetical condition that doesn’t exist in the real world
• (via GUUUI)

User Interface Engineering - Honing Your Usability Testing Skills: An Interview with Ginny Redish

Some aspects that I find design teams often need help with are:

• Thinking about the issues – what you want to learn from the usability test
• Writing good scenarios – that test the web site or product without giving
  away too much
• Facilitating comfortably – knowing when to talk and when not to, how to
  ask neutral questions, how to keep participants thinking aloud
• Taking good notes without missing anything critical
• How to report results so that the right people act on them

My experience over many, many years of that type of usability testing is that you’ll find the major problems with relatively few users (I usually say six to 12 ).

You can use a heuristic evaluation (having one or more experts review the product) to catch major and obvious flaws in a product – if there are any… However, a heuristic evaluation is not an alternative to usability testing. A heuristic evaluation is just a prediction of what users will do. Until you see the real users, you don’t know whether those predictions are right.