Barcamp Bangalore 2 - On User Experience and Usability Testing

Amit Pande Manager, Oracle User Experience ( http:// www.flickr.com/photos/amitpande ) Dec 02, 2006 Barcamp Bangalore 2 On User Experience & Usability testing

User expectations
Users have natural expectations about how things work
User Interfaces and experiences need to match this expectation
What happens when products don’t match users’ expectations?
Lets compare two products/experiences and see how they match up to users’ expectations
http://destraynor.com/serendipity/index.php?/categories/6-Usability-Reviews
Excellent role play and commentary by Des Traynor highlighting extreme usability differnces between Yahoo Calendar and 30boxes

What this presentation is about
Overview of User experience and usability testing
What is User Experience, where does it fit in?
What is Usability testing
What gets measured in usability testing
Formal and informal lab setups
Links to interesting stuff

What is User Experience?
Slide courtesy: http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/

Integrating User Experience into SDLC
4 main stages: Requirements, Design, Construct, Testing
User Experience activities occur through the development lifecycle

What is Usability Testing?
… a method by which users are asked to perform certain tasks in an effort to measure the product's ease-of-use, task time, and the user's perception of the experience
… is done throughout the development lifecycle and can be used to measure all aspects of the interface from 'jargon comprehension' to 'task flow' for critical tasks
… 4 Usability Test Methods
Exploratory
Comparison
Assessment
Validatory
… requires formal training, great sensitivity to user psychology, and adherence to protocol

Video: The Good, Bad, Ugly with end users
What’s happening in this video?
Users performing online tasks
Buying flowers
Buying car accessories
Evaluating a company’s site
Users following ‘Think Aloud’ protocol
Users walking through and expressing different usability problems
http://www.boltpeters.com/videos/bp_large.wmv
Courtesy: http:// www.boltpeters.com

Data gathered through usability testing
On Visual Design
On Layout
On Terminology
On Messaging
On Navigation
On Task Flow
On Task Support

Informal usability testing
Informal Lab setups: Participant and host sit together, and the host logs the participant's activities

Remote testing
Remote Lab setups:
Participants and host communicate over web collaboration tool
VOIP/phones
Screen sharing (WebEx or others)

Formal lab testing

Walkthrough of a sample usability test
Task name: Turn Off Login Music ( www.betterdesktop.org )
Task was performed using Suse 9.3 in a Portable Lab on the GNOME desktop. The test was administered in English. The following is a description of the task:
'Please pretend that you do not like the login music which played when you logged in. Please fix the computer so that you don't have to hear the login music again. '
Subjects are asked to rate their experience (Exp Level) with computers on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being very experienced and 1 being no experience. The breakdown of the subjects responses according experience is below:
5 3 6 6 9 3 10 1 # of Subjects Exp Level

Test users Task: Turn off login music - Summer 2006 Mpeg (22 Mb) Theora (9 Mb) Female 6/10 18-30 Subject84 Mpeg (23 Mb) Theora (9 Mb) Female 9/10 18-30 Subject82 Mpeg (16 Mb) Theora (6 Mb) Female 8/10 18-30 Subject80 Mpeg (209 Mb) Theora (89 Mb) Male 9/10 18-30 Subject79 Mpeg (81 Mb) Theora (34 Mb) Female 9/10 18-30 Subject76 Mpeg (31 Mb) Theora (13 Mb) Male 9/10 30-40 Subject72 Mpeg (32 Mb) Theora (13 Mb) Female 8/10 30-40 Subject70 Mpeg (25 Mb) Theora (10 Mb) Female 8/10 18-30 Subject48 Mpeg (19 Mb) Theora (7 Mb) Male 8/10 30-40 Subject29 Video Downloads Gender Experience Age Subject

Test videos
http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Data
Sample tasks:
Task: Find the email from chelsea@chillonia.org
Task: See if you are free at the time of the party
Task: Enter the party information into your calendar
Task: Send Chelsea your RSVP
Task: Change the time of the party in your calendar
Task: Change the system language to Spanish
Task: Turn off the firewall
Task: Turn off login music - Summer 2006
Task: Move a window to a different desktop
… .and others

Test results
5 subjects passed this task successfully. 6 subjects failed to complete the task.
The max time for this task was 14 minutes 11 seconds. The minimum time for this task was 1 minutes 28 seconds. The average time for this task was 5 minutes 0 seconds.

Other usability testing methods
Eye tracking for gaze plots and heat maps
Click streams, site logs, Google analytics

Interesting stuff to look at
http://www.betterdesktop.org – dedicated to sharing usability data with Linux developers, over 200 usability tests with KDE and GNOME desktops
http://openusability.org/ - connecting general usability community with general Development community worldwide
Advanced (and light!) usability testing techniques
Ethnio.com by Bolt | Peters
Mind Canvas by Uzanto
UserZoom – automated remote usability testing
Check http://remoteusability.com/

http://www.slideshare.net	23
http://www.itvidya.com	9
http://picsnquotes.100rabh.com	4
http://the100rabh.tumblr.com	3
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http://mymaizatulphdblog.blogspot.com	2
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Barcamp Bangalore 2 - On User Experience and Usability Testing

by Amit Pande on Dec 02, 2006

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