Tag: field testing
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Wilder than testing in the wild: usability testing by flash mob
It was a spectacularly beautiful Saturday in San Francisco. Exactly the perfect day to do some field usability testing. But this was no ordinary field usability test. Sure, there’d been plenty of planning and organizing ahead of time. And there would be data analysis afterward. What made this test different from most usability tests? 16…
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Testing in the wild defined
Lately I’ve been talking a lot about “usability testing in the wild.” There are a lot of people out there who make their livings as usability practitioners. Those people know that the conventional way to do usability testing is in a laboratory setting. If you have come to this blog from outside the world of…
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Ditch the book – Come to a virtual seminar on “usability testing in the wild”
I’m excited about getting to do a virtual seminar with the folks at User Interface Engineering (www.uie.com) on Wednesday, October 22 at 1 pm Eastern Time. I’ll be talking about doing “minimalist” usability tests — boiling usability testing down to its essence and doing just what is necessary to gather data to inform design decisions.…
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Usability testing in the wild – ballots
I’ve been busy the last few weeks doing some of the most challenging usability testing I’ve ever done. There were three locations where I did day-long test sessions. But that wasn’t the challenging part. The adventure came in testing ballots for the November election. What was wild about it? This series of tests came together…
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Should you test in a lab or in the field?
I haven’t been in a usability test lab for about a year. Ironically, since I was writing a book about usability testing, much of my work was field research to learn about particular audiences and their tasks. And, though my usual position about labs is that exploratory usability testing is probably better done in the…