Week 12

This week our lecture is on lynda.com, and the topic is testing, analysing and interpreting data. Foundations of User Experience: Usability testing with Chris Nodder.

What is usability testing?
Usability testing involves watching representative users working with your product so that you can make improvements based on what you see. Usability testing gives you invaluable feedback about how your users behave with your product. Knowing how users behave helps you create a much more suitable site or application. Rather than just guessing about what people might like or need, you can see their reactions firsthand and than make sure your product contains just the right features. Learning about issues early in the process saves development time and money.

Usability testing can be broken down into three stages.
1. you have the pre-test tasks, like finding and scheduling participants.
2. test sessions themselves.
3. post session analysis and reporting.

First we need to recruit some participants to use my application. The amount of participants is important so we tend to stick to only having 5 people. After running sessions with 5 participants you'll have seen about 80% of the issues that exist on your app. Of course you can run more people but running 5 is the most suitable.
There are two ways of finding the right participants for your study. Option one is to find them yourself and option two is the pay someone to recruit them for you. Option one is the most popular. With choosing people yourself you need to work out what attributes your study participants should have and than find a large number of people who are interested in helping who have these attributes.

Secondly we need to figure out what questions need to be asked. Asking the users direct questions doesn't always work very well so we need to be smart on how we ask the questions. People are usually ok with answering questions that relate to things they have done in the past, and these are called behavioural questions. So in order to get the users to act like they would in the real world, we typically phrase our questions as tasks. We than get the participants to complete the tasks with the interface and testing.
Once we know what questions we need to ask we than have to turn those questions into tasks so that our participants can perform for us. Because the tasks are usually written down for them to read out loud its best to keep the instructions very short.
After we do this we need room and equipment preparation. Its likely you will bring the participants to your workspace to take part in the usability studies, so setting the space up correctly is important. Firstly its not about fancy setups its is about quiet places where you can interact with people from outside the company without being disturbed.
We are now ready to create a test plan. A test plan is a great reminder and to do list. Its a simple way to keep track of everything you need to do. This is a document that tells everyone involved whats going on.
Next is the moderation of a session. This is an incredibly hard step. It requires a combination of patience, empathy, professionalism and relationship - building that only comes with practice. On top of this you need to be a good observer, recording participants actions and thinking ahead. The observer has a very specific role in usability test sessions. The usability sessions are all about active observations.

The last stage in the usability testing is the analysing and reporting of results. As soon as each session is over each observer should go back through their notes and make sure that everything they have written is understandable. The observer and the moderator should work together and discuss what they saw. After each participant you can also write up on a white board or a slip chart, any of the quantitative metrics that you are tracking for the study. Always remembering you should re test and always record your results.

The usability testing is important when creating an application for a certain group of users. I will complete my testing for my application this week, so than i can finish off my report for my last assignment. My application is fully designed on InVision i now just need to do all my testing and take note of the things that need to be changed and the elements that are good.