Fresh Facts about Usabilty Testing

Monday, July 31. 2006

According to Human Factors International, usability testing is changing... and staying the same. They raise some very important issues about where Usability Testing is heading. Here are some highlights of their latest findings:

Does the usability engineer even need to be there?

You can get valid information from automated testing. You can use it for major benchmarking measures, but don’t expect to find all the critical usability issues.

Does it matter if you test with lo-fidelity or hi-fidelity prototypes, or is that even the right question?

You decide, based on the purpose of a particular usability test, whether to use low, medium or high amounts for each dimension.

Should you test one design or many?

When only one prototype was shown, it had higher ratings and more positive comments. People were being "nicer" about evaluating the single design. When users saw three alternative designs during the same test, then they gave more critical feedback.

Usability testing = the think-aloud technique?

[when asked later to recount, rather than thinking aloud during the test] they also found that the participants left out a lot of information. The sequence of what they said they did and why they did it matched the sequence in eye tracking, but there was a lot of information omitted.

Reading the full article is strongly recommended.

Posted by Nam-ho Park in Usability at 10:58 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Reading about the think-aloud technique reminded me of a project I worked on for a major pharmaceutical company in 2003 where we brought in a 3rd party vendor, Eyetools, to use their eye tracking software during usability testing.

Eyetools believes that a certain % of feedback is captured in the think-aloud technique, but the remaining nuggets which we don't hear for one reason or another (user doesn't want to offend by saying they don't like something, user overlooks content all together, etc.) are otherwise lost. Enter Eyetools.

Using a mounted camera on top of a computer screen, the camera tracks the movement of the eye and outputs heat map charts, showing correlations between content & clicks (content users saw but deemed irrelevant, content seen & clicked on, content overlooked all together).

www.eyetools.com

#1 Sophie Campagne on 2006-08-02 13:25 (Reply)

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The User Experience & Design Blog covers issues that affect the web user's experience, which include information architecture, usability, accessibility, web development and latest trends. It is authored by the User Experience & Design Team at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.

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