Day 2: Usability Testing

Know what your users actually think—not what someone thinks they think! Everyone has an opinion but, when it comes to your website's functionality, nobody's opinion is more important, or more valuable, than that of your users.

During this workshop, you'll learn how to plan and conduct user testing on web applications and software projects.

What You'll Learn

We'll focus on these practical essentials:

• When to conduct usability testing
• Identifying the right testing methodology — from paper prototypes to remote usability testing
• Planning a usability test
• Recruiting real users as participants — sorting out the bad from the good, and providing proper incentives
• How to conduct a usability test!
• Analyzing test results to produce meaningful reports
• Effective strategies for handling political situations

Taught by expert usability consultants, this workshop includes lively discussions, real-life exercises and complete test materials — everything you need to conduct user testing on your own.

Agenda

Part I: Overview of User Testing

• Why conduct testing?
• Selecting the right testing method for your problem
• Qualitative vs. quantitative evaluations
• Calculating ROI and demonstrating value (Exercise)
• Ethical considerations

Part II: Planning Your Test

• Creating a test plan (Exercise)
• Recruiting participants
• Developing a screener (Exercise)
• Incentives
• Writing the moderator's guide and task scenarios (Exercise)

Part III: Conducting the Test

• Set up you'll need to conduct most user testing
• Who should attend?
• Moderating the session
• "Think aloud" protocol (Exercise)

Part IV: Communicating Findings

• Analyzing the data (Exercise)
• Reporting methods
• Assessing priority and severity (Exercise)
• Managing political situations

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About the Instructor

Angela is Normal Modes' founder and Chief eXperience Officer. She has more than 15 years of experience in user experience design and usability testing with complex, data-driven websites, applications, and IVR systems. On projects ranging from electronic healthcare records to commodity trading platforms to e-commerce systems for commercial and government use (including Continental Airlines online booking engine), she has designed numerous interfaces for desktop, web, and voice applications, and conducted usability tests using a variety of methods, including formal usability testing, A/B testing with paper prototypes, magnitude estimation, eye tracking and heuristic evaluations.

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