Usability Testing TIPS
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10 Usability Heuristics with Examples
User Experience is a qualitative metric subject to many factors and is an evolving discipline. “One of the pioneers who tried to objectively evaluate the user experience on digital platforms is Jakob Nielsen with his heuristic evaluation. Though they date back to the ’90s, these general rules of thumb are still valid and are used today.” SaiChandan Duggirala explains Nielsen’s 10 rules of thumb for user experience on a digital platform in common language and expands on those explanations with examples. (via @chandutravis)
Heuristic analysis for UX – How to run a usability evaluation
“Well-designed products have great usability. Great usability is a significant contributor to product quality and seamless user experience.” If you want to know for sure that you are delivering great usability, you need some way to test your product’s usability. Miklos Philips describes one way you can test your product’s usability: an inspection method called heuristic analysis. “A heuristic analysis is used to identify a product’s common usability issues so that the problems can be resolved, consequently improving the user’s satisfaction and experience and raising the chances of a digital product’s success overall.” (via @MiklosPhilips)
More features Or better usability – the product manager’s dilemma
As a product manager, you want your product to be #1 in its marketplace. When your potential customers go shopping, you want them to take a look at your product and see that it is clearly the one that they want. In order to accomplish that you have to continue to make improvements to your product. The big question is: do you improve your product with new features or better usability? Jim Anderson explains that “the right answer for a product manager is probably to balance the two different types of changes. Yes, add new features so that you’ll have something to brag about to your potential customers. However, at the same time add some usability improvements also so that the product just keeps getting better and better for your existing customers. (via @drjimanderson)
Avoiding pitfalls of usability & big data
“If you work in the tech industry and especially in UX or product management, you know that testing your features on users is a must. Whether it is the UX favoured user testing or the Product favoured big data, releasing features without checking how users respond to them is considered irresponsible, even foolish.” Shelly Bondar takes a look at pitfalls she encountered with both usability and big data in her position as product manager. (via @usejournal)
Applying usability principles to stakeholder management
“On the spectrum of the critic to advocate, stakeholders can easily slide to the left (critic) and become a product managers’ biggest distraction. By applying a usability framework to the stakeholder management process, a product manager can continuously build advocates, thereby lessening stakeholder pressure and yielding more time to simply build great products.” Lydia Henshaw describes how to apply usability principles to manage your stakeholder relationship so that you can develop advocates and create more space for building great products. (via @uxdesigncc)
5 Ways to Ensure Usability Testing Results Aren’t Ignored
So when the work has been done, what do you do with all this data? Here’s a pro tip from INDUSTRY Working Session lead, Cindy Alvarez — make sure that you are asking the right questions in the first place. You need to understand the purpose of the feature that you’re testing and grill the stakeholder of the feature you’re testing to learn of specific questions that they need answers to, e.g., “how users behave, attitudes they hold, competing technologies they use, their intent”.
10 Best Practices for Doing Software Usability Testing
It will take time to become proficient in this practice. Fortunately many have been down this road before and have shared what works and what doesn’t.
User Experience Smackdown: Usability Testing vs. User Testing
Let’s start by making a distinction between the topic today, Usability Testing, and User Testing. Whereas User Testing pertains to earlier stages in a project when you are researching the validity of an idea, Usability Testing is “the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.” Or in other words, according to Shari Thurow, its the study of “contextual task completion“.