A List Apart: Articles: The Myth of Usability Testing - The Diigo Meta page

• 13 Nov 09
  

  Clint Bush

  testing web usability tips articles

• 29 Oct 09
  

  Tony Cervo

  usability ui ux testing

• 27 Oct 09
  

  k b
  • Molich concluded, “It’s very simple: They can’t be sure!”
  • Heuristics are not a checklist, they are guidelines a usability evaluator can use as a baseline from which to apply her expertise. They are a beginning, not an end.
  • 3 more annotations...
  • • I suspect that the teams Rolf Molich hired were asked to do their evaluations without first going through a discovery process to reveal business goals and user goals, or to determine success metrics.
    • Without this context, however, testing can be misleading or misunderstood at best, and outright damaging at worst. This is also true for non-testing-based evaluation methods, such as heuristic reviews.
    • The major caveat to all of these methods is that users who are invested in completing a task act very differently than those who are not. A test participant who really wants to buy a digital camera will behave differently on a commerce site than a participant whose only motivation is to be compensated. Those who are invested in the tasks will persevere through far more problems than those who are not. When using any of these methods, it’s important to try to find participants who actually want to complete the very tasks you wish to evaluate.
• 25 Oct 09
  

  Dnl Grb

  Diigo - daniele g's Bookmarks

• 23 Oct 09
  

  Marcin Kasperski

  usability subjective article myth UX

• 22 Oct 09
  

  Zohar Manor-Abel

  "Usability evaluations are good for a lot of things, but determining what a team’s priorities should be is not one of them. Fortunately, there is an explanation for these counterintuitive outcomes that can help us choose a more appropriate evaluation course."

  technology usability webdesign webdev alistapart

• 20 Oct 09
  

  Rohan Jayasekera

  usability

• 

  Jason Mock

  usability

• 

  Otavio Silva
  • 310 different usability problems
  • nly six problems were reported by more than half of the team
  • 7 more annotations...
  • • 232 problems (75 percent) were reported only once
    • Many of the problems that were classified as “serious” were only reported by a single team
    • 17 teams evaluated the Hotel Penn website
    • only nine of these problems were reported by more than half of the teams
    • the teams reported 340 usability problems
    • 205 problems—60% of all the findings reported—were identified only once
    • Usability evaluations are good for a lot of things, but determining what a team’s priorities should be is not one of them.
• 

  Mr. DiGi

  usability testing

• 

  Florin Machidon

  diigo

• 

  daniele g
  • Five-second tests: Show a screen to a user for five seconds and ask her to write down everything she remembers.

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