21 Why can't Usability testing drive priorities?

I am not sure what you mean by usability testing cannot drive team priorities? Your explanation is all about why BAD usability testing cannot drive priorities. I think I failed to see where you spoke of GOOD usability testing to drive priorities.

But I do agree with you, usability testing should be in context. If your usability test cases capture the business needs properly, then it can direct the development efforts in making that test pass (TDD).

posted at 07:49 am on October 28, 2009 by franz_see

22 Diminishing returns on Usabiilty Testing

The article ‘Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users’ (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html) speaks of that.

And I guess that could be an explanation as well the numbers in “User Interface Engineering”.

posted at 07:51 am on October 28, 2009 by franz_see

23 Negative feedback analysis

Usability tests are great at telling a team what direction they should not pursue, but probably not much else. Unfortunately that is perhaps the most important information regarding creative direction that “experts” may ever hope to receive that is not often appreciated strictly with this regard. Web developers are, by the way, experts at knowing what the customer wants, which is why they are so good at telling the customer what they want.

My employer subscribes to usability tests that provide incredible feedback. How scientific is that information and how wonderful are those picky details? I don’t know. The evidence does not suggest a decisive direction to pursue, but it is quick to tell you when you are wrong in comparison to nearly identical expectations from competitor websites. If you are wrong over and over… eventually a patter should emerge of what you should NOT be doing. I find that information to be of profound value, although it is commonly in directly conflict with expectations of what usability should be.

posted at 03:10 am on November 2, 2009 by austincheney

24 It Has its Uses

I agree with this article that Usability Testing isn’t the ultimate standard in catching issues and solving problems on the web. However, I’ve found in my own experience that testing can provide some insights into how your website is perceived, as well as being able to let you separate yourself from your own company jargon.

We used testing on a redesign for a university in Philadelphia, and some of the best insight we gained was from what users wanted to get to first, second, etc. We also gained insight into the application process we had built, and was able to rewrite instructions in layman’s terms, instead of the “advertising” jargon we had been using.

posted at 04:20 pm on November 5, 2009 by psuhiker

25 Usability Testing vs. Usability Listening

You can’t just sit there listening to everyone’s comments. Many users have a terrible sense of aesthetics or want the application to be tailor-made for them. Every site and application needs to undergo usability testing of some sort, but more important is having the services of a designer (and hopefully developers too) who has usability patterns and standards down to a T. A designer with the right eye can pick the true usability flaws out of the sea of personal preferences expressed in during usability testing.

posted at 10:48 pm on November 9, 2009 by Thomas Allen

26

Aside from the fact that I would absolutely believe that a typical Microsoft application like hotmail has AT LEAST 300 usability problems, there are some other oddities about this study.

The reviewers of the study mention that there were reporting problems from the teams, as well as being pretty fine grained about wether ‘problems’ were in fact the same or not. It almost difficult to trust the outcomes of these studies.

Also I find it hard to believe that if you continue to expand usability studies you won’t be able to find a correlation with major problems. Most studies are able to zoom right in to 1-4 major problems right away. This study did in fact that there were 9(?) problem that were reported by more than a few teams. This makes perfect sense. You need to prioritize and fix major problems.

I agree that you need to understand what your expectations are from these kinds of studies. You looking for ‘usability’ problems, not people’s opinions. If you want opinions go have a code review. If people are unable to complete a well written task, well, then you have a problem – which is why these studies are run.

It’s also my opinion that bringing in current users of a system is a problem. Even sites that require a lot of domain knowledge are able to be tested with first time users and a well written script. Bringing people back to test again is usually not a good idea because (like you mentioned) they’ve become familiar already with your screwed up navigation.

posted at 11:56 am on November 12, 2009 by ascotan

27 Use Proper External Usability Testing

Nice article and I do agree with many points. We find that the best method is to have a group of 10-15 external users all with different tasks to perform, e.g. buy a pair of jeans, sign up to the newsletter, find a course, etc. This way you get a good cross section and then you sit down with your creative and development teams and analyse the data. Then we would make any recommendations for design/fucntionality changes going forward.

posted at 02:57 pm on February 23, 2010 by cal1977

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