Articles about Usability Testing
Improve Your Usability Tests: Learnings from Evaluating 100-Plus Usability Tests
Evaluation of videos and usability test reports from 100-plus UX professionals obtaining CPUX-UT certification gives expert insights into improving usability testing and collecting meaningful findings. [Read More]
Virtual Techniques to Gather User Data for Optimal UX (Book Review)
Remote Usability Testing includes virtual techniques and digital UX methods used to gather user data in real time to make design decisions. This book provides detailed steps and considerations to gather user data, analyze that data, and translate those findings into design decisions. [Read More]
Cognitive Interviewing: A Method to Evaluate Surveys
Learn how cognitive interviewing can improve your surveys so you really get the data you need. Surveys are a common method for collecting data from users. To ensure you get the data you want, you must ask questions that truly reflect your research goals. Cognitive interviewing is a useful method for evaluating how well users can understand and answer your questions. In this article, we describe cognitive interviewing and compare it to usability testing, showing the similarities and differences, so you can start using cognitive interviewing to improve your own surveys. [Read More]
Reliability and Validity: Ensuring a Foolproof UX Research Plan
Methodical user research following best practices yields good results, but are they “reliable” or “valid”? Here's how we apply social science concepts to UX research. [Read More]
Startups and UX: Relating Success to Good UX Practices
Research conducted on startups in Detroit, Michigan proves that the success of any startup hinges on the employment of UX to feed the ROI. [Read More]
How Do Other People Do It? A Comparative Review of Usability Study Reports
An experimental insight into how Comparative Usability Evaluation studies and reports are done. [Read More]
10 Steps for Drafting a User Research Program, Part 1
Research project planning provides benefits to both partners and practitioners alike. This article outlines the first five of ten recommended steps for research program planning. [Read More]
Chatbots: Consider Using Them for Automating Research Study Participant Communication
Chatbots are an effective tool for automating communication with research participants. Learn how a chatbot was built to communicate with participants via SMS on their phone. [Read More]
Research in a Box: Piloting a New Methodology
Research in a box, a kit mailed to participants, is cost-effective remote UX research methodology allowing Walgreens to collect feedback from geographically distributed team members. [Read More]
The Five Stages of Grief: Usability Test Observer Edition
In this humorous piece, Cliff Anderson proposes a comparison between Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief and the experiences of observers new to the usability testing process. [Read More]
Creating Usability Maturity Models for Large-Scale Projects
The Usability Maturity Model (UMM) is used to plan, measure and track the usability growth during product development so teams will know when their products are ready for launch. [Read More]
SUStisfied? Little-Known System Usability Scale Facts
SUS will continue to provide a reliable, valid and quick measure of ease of use and average SUS scores may increase due to UX improvements. [Read More]
Boozeability: The Rise of Drunk User Testing
Conducting user research in a party atmosphere setting is growing in popularity but comes with ethical risks and methodology concerns. [Read More]
The Three Stooges Mock Usability Test: A Method To Train Inexperienced Facilitators
A hands-on method for training people new to research, or those wanting a refresher how to facilitate sessions with challenging participants. [Read More]
Five-Second Rules Help Build a Better Test (Book Review)
A review of The UX Five-Second Rules: Guidelines for User Experience Design’s Simplest Testing Technique by Paul Doncaster. An online, unmoderated method based on human perception. [Read More]
User Research for Non-Researchers: How to Get User Feedback Without a Dedicated Researcher
A step-by-step guide on how to conduct qualitative research for times when your UX researcher is not available. [Read More]
Surviving Tricky and Sticky Research Situations (Book Review)
A review of The Moderator’s Survival Guide by Donna Tedesco and Fiona Tranquada. Improve your research moderating skills. [Read More]
Talking To Strangers On The Street: Recruiting Through Intercepting People
Recruiting for research projects can be challenging, but going to places where the people are can make it easier to find the right participants. [Read More]
Getting Ahead of the Game: Challenges and Methods in Games User Research
Game development requires a deep knowledge of user needs. In addition to leveraging established usability research methods, games user research increasingly incorporates advances in physiological measurements and visualizations to better understand user behavior. [Read More]
UX Debt in the Enterprise: A Practical Approach
Designing a scorecard comparing various products across UX frameworks, usability maturity, and technology platforms helps identify solutions that improve products’ usability and lower UX debt. [Read More]
Get it RITE: Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE)
With RITE, UX teams examine interface alternatives in a short time, evolving a more usable final design more quickly than with traditional usability testing methods. [Read More]
Case Study on Usability Evaluation in Costa Rica: A Dual Perspective
The article examines the perspective of usability evaluation of software development organizations and novice software developers through a case study conducted in Costa Rica. (Full article available in English and Español) [Read More]
Usability Script and Moderator’s Guide: 2 Tools or 1? Communicating with Study Respondents
A good script allows a moderator to support conversation with a participant, learning from the participant’s freedom, while still providing the necessary controlled environment. [Read More]
Usability Testing for Healthcare Portals: Even Small Problems Add Up
Want to fix the web portals for a major government initiative? Usability testing with health consumers helped improve CoveredCA, a portal in California. [Read More]
Seeing is Believing (Book Review)
A review of Eye tracking the User Experience – A Practical Guide to Research by Aga Bojko. A must-read book with tips for running eye tracking studies. [Read More]
Engaging Study Observers: An Overlooked Step in User Research
Observer participation is an important piece in conducting usability. A little work up front can help engage observers more effectively. [Read More]
UX Professionals + Stakeholders (Book Review)
A review of It's OUR Research by Tomer Sharon.
In this compendium of experts’ advice, you’ll find useful nuggets that haven’t been recorded anywhere else. [Read More]
The p Stops Here (Book Review)
A review of Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research by Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis A convenient reference text for practitioners who need to measure the user experience and need guidance to determine the appropriate way in which to do the measuring. [Read More]
A Unique Approach to Software Usability: What’s In It for Your Development Team
Use the “down” time early in a project to get the team involved in usability from the start. Developers gain a balanced workload and increased prestige. [Read More]
Should We Conduct this Usability Study? Ethics Considerations in Evaluations
Can it be unethical to conduct a user experience evaluation? An accessibility evaluation before a usability test can prevent frustrating, painful, or difficult situations. [Read More]
Practical Guidance at Every Level (Book Review)
A review of Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set . . .Test! by Carol M. Barnum
Practical guidance for UX professionals at every experience level. From equipment, lab vs. field testing, remote testing; testing protocols, analyzing results, and reporting the findings. [Read More]
Testing by Teaching: Peer Tutoring, a Usability Evaluation Method for Children
Peer Tutoring helps engage and encourage children during usability testing. The social context makes the test more natural, resulting in richer findings. [Read More]
Making the Case: Rounding Out Usability Testing with Web Analytics
Using qualitative data, you can plan usability tests and analyze test results by reviewing where users currently go on your site. [Read More]
Making Everything Fit (Book Review)
A review of Responsive Web Design by Ethan MarcotteMaking a case and practical instruction for creating a design that scales based on platform. [Read More]
The Fate of a Digital Slate
A low-cost tablet prototype for assisting in the tracking of child malnutrition in rural India encountered socio-technical challenges beyond usability in field test. [Read More]
Follow the Flow: Using Mind-Mapping to Capture User Feedback
Mind-mapping can provide a visual representation of user feedback during usability testing. It can be a valuable tool for capturing non-linear data flow. [Read More]
Better Games: Insights from Eye Tracking
Using eye tracking during usability testing of games decreases potentially false assumptions, and helps developers better understand player behavior by offering qualitative insights. [Read More]
An Emerging Tool: Facial Expression Recognition Software
New software can read faces to detect basic emotions as someone uses a website, giving a more detailed view of how they react. [Read More]
Playing to Learn: Teaching User Research to Game Design Students
Students of Game Player Experience understand the value of user research first hand by learning good game user experience principles and seeing those principles implemented. [Read More]
Book Review: Of Testing and Techniques
A review of Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-Scale Online User Experience Studies by Bill Albert, Tom Tullis, Donna Tedesco. This book is well-structured for practitioners of remote usability testing. [Read More]
Testing by Minors: Risk Prevention for UX Pros
When conducting testing with children, full disclosure and reasonable procedures are your best defense against potential legal complications. [Read More]
Taking Usability into the Trenches: Importance of Ethnographic Research and Field Testing
Employing a mixed field method that bridges the gap between ethnographic and laboratory approaches may address the need for real world context in product and design usability evaluation. [Read More]
Engaging Teams with Rich Reporting: Recipe for a Research Findings Expo
Rich reporting, for example, an expo, is an improvement beyond traditional written reports leading to a more meaningful engagement among a wider variety of stakeholders. [Read More]
Around the Globe: Lab Research in the United States and Europe
Those who do international field work need to become experts in the differences in research methodology from one culture to the next. [Read More]
Field Research: Another View
Marketing and usability research "field" or gather data in different ways. Both disciplines would benefit by carefully considering the assumptions they impose with their approaches to sampling. [Read More]
Usability Testing by People with Disabilities: Some Guerrilla Tactics
Guerrilla usability testing software assists testing with people with disabilities leading to more usable and accessible software for all users—disabled, non-disabled, and seniors. [Read More]
User-Centered Procurement: Evaluating the Usability of “Off-the-Shelf” Software
UX teams must extend the role of usability evaluation to the "off-the-shelf" software procurement process itself. [Read More]
Role Reversal: Testing for Ease of Learning and Recall
When testing a software package, include traditional roles found in a pyramidal training model but also a reversed, "train the trainer" round. [Read More]
Help! Where Is It When You Need It?
Provide form instructions on a separate web page and place a “Help” link at the beginning to help users who prefer or require “up front” instructions to complete the form. [Read More]
Conducting Field Studies with Older Adults Lessons for Recruiting and Testing Older Users
Field testing and field research work especially well with older adults, if you are sensitive to their needs in both the recruiting and data collection process. [Read More]
