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: test
Theory
Design
5 Effective Ways for Usability Testing to Play Nice with Agile
Usability testing has been a fundamental tool in the UX arsenal for decades now. The value of actually meeting your customers and letting them experience your product makes a significant impact to the shape of that product. In it’s most formal version, testing can be a multi-day, multi-thousand $/€ process that delivers final analysis days if not weeks later. With many organizations moving to an Agile philosophy and methodology, UX practitioners are finding it difficult to integrate formal usability testing into this faster-paced, iterative approach to software development.
See? Lions and zebras can get along. So, too, can Agile and Usability Testing.
How-tos
The Perfect Task: Optimizing Usability Tasks And Questions
Automated remote usability testing is a very simple and efficient way to gather feedback on digital interfaces – if done correctly. When you do usability testing automated AND remotely, it’s good to keep in mind that the participant is missing some common communication channels. You ask participants for feedback, but you can’t see their faces, while your participants can’t ask any questions to express discomfort or uncertainty. When you’re aware of these limitations you’re able to compensate for it by carefully designing your test questions.
Announcements
Improved widget: customizable, lightweight and fast
We’ve just updated the standard widget you can use to promote your visual surveys. If you embed this widget (optional) on your website it will be visible in the bottom right corner and looks like this:
Read the rest of this entry to see a live example and learn how to customize this widget.
Demo UX Cases
Mashable redesign: What draws attention?
Mashable made a fresh start of the new year by launching a redesign. The intention of this new design was to put more focus on the stories, removing clutter, and dividing the content into sections (Home, Social Media, Mobile, Web Video, Entertainment, Business, Tech, and Jobs). In the past week more than 150 people commented on the blog post about the new design. Most reactions on Mashable seem to be positive about the new look and feel: ‘Fresh & clean’, ‘I like the sections’, ‘More professional’, and ‘Clean and Simple’. What are the most important changes in this design iteration and what can we learn from feedback? We asked 60 social-media-savy participants for feedback.
Mashable: What draws attention?
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
Announcements
Test your mobile site or app with Usabilla
In about 2 weeks we’ll introduce a new update of our test interface, which will make it even easier for participants to rate a web page or concept. Currently we have an average conversion rate of about 30% on all our tests, we hope to improve this with the new interface. The new release will make it easier to add notes and will offer options for additional instructions to help your participants with some extra instructions or context.
We’re also going to introduce a mobile version for Android and iPhone about two weeks later. In about 4 weeks you’ll be able to test your mobile apps and websites on the iPhone and Android phones. Users can use the same simple test interface we offer for standard tests in their mobile browser to answer questions and annotate your mobile interfaces.
Sign up for our free beta and you’ll be the first to try our mobile version.
How-tos
Improving usability for participants
We have been working on some usability improvements in our frontend. These changes have been released last week and should enhance the user experience for your participants. Users get a clear introduction before they start the test. The toolbar has been simplified, the dimming on the mockups has been removed and users no longer need to register before they can rate a page. These improvements should push up the conversion rates for your tests.
Announcements
Create a usability test in less than 5 minutes
The original video in this post has been replaced by a new one.
This screencast shows how to create a basic usability test in less than five minutes. Feel free to sign up for our closed beta (launching in April) if you’d like to try this for yourself. More info on our data visualization soon!
Announcements
First testcase: The Next Web 2009
The past months we’ve been working on a prototype for our online usability testsuite. The enthousiasm and efforts of our team are beginning to pay off. We’re making big progress on the both the backend and frontend.
Last week we kicked off with a basic test of our frontend and asked users to give their feedback on the website of The Next Web 2009. With the help of some early beta subscribers we collected an interesting dataset, which can be used to optimize our analysis. We could still use some extra input from others, so if you’re curious and want to be one of the first to start your own simple usability test in the future: sign up for our beta.
