Are Severe Problems Uncovered Earlier in Usability Tests?

After I conducted my first usability test in the 1990’s I was struck by two things: Just how many usability problems are uncovered and how some problems repeat after observing just a few users. In almost every usability test I’ve conducted since then I’ve continued to see this pattern. Even after running 5 to 10

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What Goes into a Usability Test Plan?

Failing to plan is planning to fail. It’s both good practice and often necessary to have a test plan before beginning a usability test. Like any plan, it should not only lay out the framework of the study, but also help identify problems with the methodology, metrics or tasks while something can still be done

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Measuring User Confidence in Usability Tests

Are you sure you did that right? When we put the effort into making a purchase online, finding information or attempting tasks in software, we want to know we’re doing things right. Having confidence in our actions and the outcomes is an important part of the user experience. That’s why we ask users how confident

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7 Ways to Find Users for Usability Testing

You need users in order to do usability testing. It can be a small scale do-it-yourself usability test or a large sample corporate usability test but finding available users can be a burden. It’s often cited as one of the reasons usability testing isn’t done more often. The process by which you find your users

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Seven Tips for Writing Usability Task Scenarios

The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you’ll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. A

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5 Ways To Maximize Your Usability Testing Efforts

When conducting a usability test, gathering input on a design, or testing new features, we strongly recommend the 1:1 moderated session over group sessions. However, we usually aren’t convincing others to run 1:1 sessions. Instead, we spend more effort convincing others of combining the traditional in-person 1:1 session with other methods. We find we can

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The Value of Measuring Poor User Experiences

When we have a good experience with a service or product, we enjoy it, tell our friends, and will probably use that service or product again. But when we have a frustrating or poor experience, such as the occurrence of message boxes relentlessly popping up during sporting events, we hate the product, tell our friends

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10 Things To Know About Unmoderated Usability Testing

One of the biggest barriers to conducting usability testing is the cost and time involved in testing. Moderators have to bring users to a dedicated location, test each one (usually one at a time), and only then get results from only a handful of users. Unmoderated usability testing is a technique using software such as

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9 Biases in Usability Testing

Usability testing is artificial. We do the best we can to simulate a scenario that is as close to what users would actually do with the software while we observe or record them. However, no amount of realism in the tasks, data, software or environment can change the fact that the whole thing is contrived.

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9 Insights From Ecommerce Usability Studies

Have you wanted to purchase something online, but couldn’t? Were you willing to pay full price just to get a product but the experience got in the way? You’re not alone. Just about every week we’re running a usability test in our lab or remotely on an ecommerce website. We’ve watched thousands of users attempt

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