In one of the last projects I worked on I had the opportunity to conduct usability testing with children between 6 and 12 years old. In this article I present five things you should consider when working with children.
Theory
Tag Archives: participants
Theory
Demo UX Cases
Five Things You Can Test Under Five Minutes
Lets dish out some quick ways to test and improve your product. Long tests with a lot of tasks certainly can have their place (for example in the early stages of a design). However, many of our customers are improving their website by running multiple, recurring, and short tests.
Recurring tests are easy to setup and manage. They are of the ‘set and forget’ type. Participating only takes a couple of minutes and is fun to do. It’s also a good example of agile design: small improvements can be made to the existing product quickly. Can’t you just taste the low hanging fruit?
On to the examples!
Theory
Usability Testing With Children: A Lesson From Piaget
Children are becoming an increasingly important target group on the web. Good usability and high user experience are crucial aspects for a successful website. Early and repetitive user testing is the way to go. If we address children on our website, we need to focus on what they want. We need to include children as a target group in our user testing.
In this post I’d like to take a look at usability testing with different age groups. First, let’s have a look at the question-answer process to understand the importance of cognitive abilities. I will then briefly introduce Piaget’s theory of cognitive growth and explain how it can be useful for usability testing with children. What can we learn from a widely recognized scientist from the beginning of the twentieth century?
How-tos
Recruit participants with Ethnio
Recruiting the right participants for your test can seem the most difficult thing. Not with Ethnio. Ethnio is an app developed by Bolt | Peters for live recruiting. By adding one simple line of code to your website, you can display a pop-up recruiting screener to your website’s visitors.
How-tos
Promote your test on Twitter & Facebook
Social networks can be an interesting place to recruit participants who are interested in your website, product or service, to participate in a short test. Usabilla offers some simple ways to promote your tests on Facebook and Twitter by posting the URL of your test and a short message on these social networks. You can also use the Redirect URL in Usabilla to make it easy for your participants to invite other participants and trigger a small viral effect.
Demo UX Cases
Underdogs beat Expedia in usability showdown
The international travel site Expedia (Alexa Rank 816) gets defeated by its competitors Hotwire, Priceline, and Travelocity on basic usability tasks. Expedia performed the worst in a usability showdown between the four major international travel sites. A total of 148 people participated in this usability test and tried to perform three basic tasks on one of the four websites.
Alexa rank for Expedia, Hotwire, Travelocity, and Priceline
Book a room in Amsterdam
The 148 participants tried to book a hotel room in Amsterdam in a certain price range on one of the four big travel websites. They had to find a way to search for a hotel room (task 1), limit their search on price (task 2), and book a room in the correct price range (task 3). The task performance was measured by the success rate and the time per task.
Expedia, Hotwire, Travelocity, and Priceline