Usability Testing is without a doubt the most powerful tool for testing a design available to the User Experience practitioner. It allows the UI Designer to assess their product with real users before the design is released to the wider audience. Then why is it that so many designs go untested before they are released into public use?

Full-blown usability testing (as described by experts like Jakob Nielsen) is a long, often tedious process which results in findings that could (if cast in the wrong light) make the UI Designer look inexperienced. Not only that, some user experience practitioners believe that usability testing requires a complex and expensive lab setup. Usability testing can also mire a project’s timeline because the testing process takes time to execute it’s iterative nature is difficult to estimate and plan for.

Selma Zafar (Senior Human Factors Engineer at Nokia Mobile Phones) and Chris Masterton (Interaction Design consultant for Optimal User Interfaces) have executed numerous usability tests with varying scopes and project deadlines. In this talk they will provide insights into how usability testing can be integrated into a project schedule successfully and how testing itself can be optimized while still providing meaningful results.

Discussion topics will include:

• Quick vs. Full usability testing
• Setting up success criteria before the test
• Determining testing tasks
• Quick vs. Full usability lab setup
• Running an effective usability test
• Creating a usability test report
• Why negative test results should not reflect badly on the designer
• Tips and tricks to successful testing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.