everybody lies: rapid cadence research & usability testing

Will Evans @semanticwill

Yana Kuchirko@mslogophiliac

“When usability is inherent in the products we use, it’s invisible.We don’t think about it. But we

know it’s there.”

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Defining Usability:

- International Organization of Standardization

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Critical ElementsSpecific Context:

Specific Users:

Specific Goals:

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Effective:

Efficient:

Engaging:

Error Tolerant:

Easy to Learn:

The 5 E’s of Usability

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Evaluation of Product

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Formative

Summative

Types of Usability Testing

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#AgileUX Process at TheLadders

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Establish Test Goals

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What to test:

Where to test:

How to test:

Determine The Process of Testing

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Define the “Core” Audience

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Developing “Personas”

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Sample Persona: ‘Todd’

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Recruit Participants

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Create “real” testing scenarios

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Determine type of feedback

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Creating Questionnaires

• Allows people to rate overall experience

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Creating Questionnaires

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Prepare a test schedule

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Write a Test Plan

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“We are testing the product, not you.”

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Moderator’s Script

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Being an Effective Moderator

• Open-ended, non-leading questions beginning with “what” or “how” (never “why”!)

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Think-aloud Process

• Why the participant is taking an action

• What they think about the process• What they expect to happen

(matching user mental model to system model)

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Understanding Your User

• Users are people with a goal which the product needs to support

• People are in a hurry to reach their goal and they rarely read text until they come across content that matches their goal

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“We finished testing. Now what does it all mean?”

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What Did We See?

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What Does It Mean?

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Triangulation Analysis

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What Should We Do About It?

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Types of Severity Scales

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Making Recommendations

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Framing Findings: Key Considerations

• Will audience already believe changes are needed or must you convince them?

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Writing a Report

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Sample Report

Thanks!

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences include directing UX for social network analytics and terrorism risk modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.

His passions include design and critical theory, postmodernism, information visualization, psychology, neuroscience, and wine. He lives in New York, NY, drinks far too much coffee, wears only black, and was Design Co-Chair for the IxDA Interaction10 conference in Savannah, Georgia in February, 2010. He also served on the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute leading marketing and events.