Tag: usability testing
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Is your team stuck in a bubble?
This happens. The team is heads down, just trying to do work, to make things work, and then you realize it. Perspective is gone. Recently I gave a couple of talks about usability testing and collaboratively analyzing data. There was a guy in the first row who was super attentive as I showed screen shots…
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Testing in the wild, seizing opportunity
When I say “usability test,” you might think of something that looks like a psych experiment, without the electrodes (although I’m sure those are coming as teams think that measuring biometrics will help them understand users’ experiences). Anyway, you probably visualize a lab of some kind, with a user in one room and a researcher…
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Looking for love: Deciding what to observe for
The team I was working with wanted to find out whether a prototype they had designed for a new intranet worked for users. Their new design was a radical change from the site that had been in place for five years and in use by 8,000 users. Going to this new design was a big…
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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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Insights quickly and cheaply
After I gave a day-long seminar and a short talk at UI 13, I sat down with Tim Keirnan of Design Critique to talk about doing usability testing in the wild for quick, cheap insights from users. Download that podcast.
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Testing in the wild: Conversation with Tim Keirnan
It’s always stimulating talking with Tim Keirnan, who is the host of the podcast Design Critique. We had a great conversation about how to do evaluation of designs in the field rather than in the lab — and how easy and quick it can be. (Recorded in November, 2008)
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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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The difference between good UX teams and great ones, with Jared Spool
I had a blast in this conversation with Jared Spool (recorded June 7, 2008) about what qualities make user experience design teams great and why some teams just can’t get past good.
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Are you doing “user testing” or “usability testing”?
Calling anything user testing just seems bad. Okay, contrary to the usual content on this blog – which I’ve tried to make about method and technique – this discussion is philosophical and political. If you feel it isn’t decent to talk about the politics of user research in public, then you should perhaps click away…