Usability Testing On A Budget

Budget Usability Testing
or
More Testing, Fewer Excuses
Chas Grundy
University of Notre Dame
eduWeb 2009

Why bother testing?
Testing helps you discover problems
before they can publicly humiliate you.

Why bother testing?

If it's a pain to do, you probably won't do it.

The Rules
1. Little or no money (< $50)
2. Little or no time (< 2 hours)
3. Little or no expertise (could start today)

Screw the scientific method

Learning Something is Better Than Learning Nothing

Learning
What do you want to learn?
How can you learn it?
Who can you learn it from?
When to test?

Test early, test often
Writing and Editing
Content into Website
Review Website
Content Planning
Testing
Launch Website
Design Mockups
Build Templates
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test

You can test anything
Paper Prototypes
Wireframes
Mockups
Pages
Live sites
Competitors’ websites

Designing Your Tests
Get task-oriented
Don’t give away the answer
There are no right and wrong answers
Let the user do the talking
Don’t ask open-ended questions

People will create opinions if you ask for them.

What users say isn't what they do.
I hate scrolling.
I would never click there.
Nobody would do that.

Objection: Speculation!

Everything you do could be wrong.

It's not good enough just to learn, you have to take action
Analysis – reviewing the results
Fix the obvious
Do a special test for the hard stuff
Re-test to make sure you got it right

Design once, increment forever

Test early, test often
At the end of the project is too late!

The Actual Tests - Tools
Windows
Camtasia ($179) *
Morae ($1,120) *
Jing Pro ($15)
Windows Media Encoder (free)
Mac
Silverback ($50)
Screenflow ($90) *
Jing Pro ($15)
Any screencasting/recording tool can work.
* educational discount

Resources
Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug
useit.com, Jakob Nielsen
usability.gov
Start a Usability Testing Program in 5 Days
http://www.edustyle.net/blog/?p=445
More:
http://delicious.com/chasgrundy/usability

So long and thanks for all the fish
Chas Grundy
University of Notre Dame
twitter @chasgrundy
blog grundyhome.com
email chas@grundyhome.com