Usability Testing: Personal Experience and Experts’ Theories
How my experience in running several usability testings refers to some popular experts’ theories.
There are many usability testing theories that you can reach out to from various sources. From all of those theories, there might be some things that contradict your opinion. The only way to know what works for you is by running at least one usability test. We will discuss how my experience in running usability tests refers to some popular experts’ theories.
Types of Usability Testing
There are 2 types of usability testing based on how it’s implemented, the sophisticated one and the discount one (the more simple). Steve Krug mentioned that discount usability testing can be easily conducted with less money, time, and effort but still effectively gives lots of useful information. Therefore, discount usability testing can be conducted way more often than sophisticated usability testing. To receive lots of information about a product design frequently, I run discount usability testing once every two weeks.
Discount Usability Testing
David Cronin, Alan Cooper, and Robert Reimann stated that usability testing requires a fairly complete and coherent design artifact to test against. Therefore, you can conduct usability testing as long as you have a product design ready to test such as a prototype, website, etc.
Steve Krug mentioned that the importance of recruiting representative users in usability testing is overrated. It’s good to do your testing with people who are similar to the people who will use your site, but it’s much more important to test early and often. It’s better to test several times with a few participants in several discount testings rather than only test once with lots of participants in single sophisticated testing. Steve Krug also mentioned that all participants should receive a reasonable incentive.
In discount usability testing, you don’t have to use a usability lab with an observation room behind a one-way mirror, and two video cameras so you could record the users’ reactions and the thing they were using. The point is, just run it with all the minimum requirements that you can get.
How I Run Discount Usability Testing
Back then, I ran several online usability testing. Why online? it’s due to the pandemic that people find it difficult to interact physically with each other. In my opinion, online usability testing can be counted as discount usability testing since you don’t need things such as a usability lab, many cameras, etc. Online usability testing allows participants to participate from anywhere they are as long as they have a stable internet connection and supporting devices.
What should I do before running my first usability testing? Before I started my first usability testing, I learned some experts’ theories about usability testing from books and the internet. The books that I read are About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and Don’t Make Me Think (2nd Edition).
How often do I conduct usability testing? I conduct online usability testing once every two weeks (biweekly) to receive valuable findings of a product design frequently. To have a consistent and neat schedule, I set a certain day where I run usability testing from the very beginning.
How many participants are there in each usability testing? To make it possible for me to run usability testing once every two weeks, I only need 3–4 participants for each testing. In that way, I won’t run out of participants for further testing.
How do I recruit participants? First of all, I created a document called Recruitment Criteria. The document contains the criteria of participants that are needed in the testing. After I know exactly what type of people that I need, I begin to search and recruit some people for the testing. In the recruiting process, I offer people a reasonable incentive to make it clear that I value their opinion and I hope they will be eager to participate.
Where do I run the testing? Since it’s online usability testing, I can run the testing from any place that has a stable internet connection. I choose to run the testing from the office where I usually work.
What do I do as part of preparation? I only need to prepare documents such as a Discussion Guide (which contains the script for me to read during the testing), a Consent Form, Task Cards, and a document for note-taking.
What do I do after running the testing? Straight after running the testing, I need to invite the development team to join me in a debrief session for approximately 15 minutes. After finishing all usability testing sessions, I need to create a report containing findings from the testing. I also need to present and explain the report to the company stakeholders.
