How many of you have run usability tests that look like this: Individual, one-hour sessions, in which the participant is performing one or more tasks from a scenario that you and your team have come up with, on a prototype, using bogus or imaginary data. It’s a hypothetical situation for the user, sometimes, they’re even role-playing.
Anyone? That’s what I thought. Me too. I just did it a couple of weeks ago.
But that model of usability testing is broken. Why? Because one of the first things we found out is that the task we were asking people to do – doing some basic financial estimates based on goals for retirement – involved more than the person in the room with me.
For the husbands, the task involved their wives because the guys didn’t actually know what the numbers were for the household expenses. For the women, it was their children, because they wanted to talk to them about medical expenses and plans for assisted living. For younger people it was their parents or grandparents, because they wanted to learn from them how they’d managed to save enough to help them through school and retire, too. Continue reading Usability testing is broken: Rethinking user research for social interaction design