On User Interface Testing

ON USER INTERFACE TESTING Piotr Fedorczyk aka @presentday at User Experience Camp Italia 2010

PIOTR? WTH? Piotr is: - UI designer successfully pushing UX - working on different projects for different brands internally in Dada - currently shared between two Dada offices as being the lead UI designer adn dev for Dada Pro adv platform, Simply.com and continuing to work on Dada Pro stores - working for my own clients as well - i’m a Mac user which has an impact on the tools i use

PIOTR? WTH? AH, RIGHT. Piotr is: - UI designer successfully pushing UX - working on different projects for different brands internally in Dada - currently shared between two Dada offices as being the lead UI designer adn dev for Dada Pro adv platform, Simply.com and continuing to work on Dada Pro stores - working for my own clients as well

USER INTERFACE TESTING I will talk about testing your designs.

ONCE UPON A TIME… Credit Credit Credit My experience in interface testing began a few years ago with about 15 bottles of wine at Andy Budd’s workshop “Guerrilla Usability Testing”. I then learned to moderate usability testing sessions by examining diﬀerent bottle openeners. It was shortly before SilverbackApp was launched. Two weeks later I spent a whole day on testing an interface I designed on 12 testers recruited internally.

UI TESTING Why to test? To make products easier to use, obviously. But there’s another important reason for that: to learn to design better.

UI TESTING To make the product better. To become a better designer. You will be suprised to learn how many bad assumptions you make, or how smart you think users may be just after one usability testing session. There’s a lot to discover.

UI TESTING …Steve Krug said: [quote]

UI TESTING You have the time and the budget. You have the permission to test. Often the reason not to test may be lack of money or time. You can also work for somebody that think that testing isn’t necessary for the product. But it is necessary for you to do that. If not for improving the product then it will be for your own professional growth as a designer.

UI TESTING Leadership is an action, not a position. You have the permission to test. Do it for your own sake. If necessary do it outside of work for once, or during your lunch break, don’t waste your time on reading yet another blog article, do a quick test instead. You will learn more. Do it undercover. Your boss will reward you later.

UI TESTS You can test your designs in every phase of your ui building workﬂow: wireframing, prototyping, graphic concepts creation or even after launch.

gomockingbird.com Mockingbird is a sweet little online application for creating semi-interactive wireframes that you can then export or share online, make browsable and even test directly. Cross browser, simple. With everything you might need in the widgets library.

antetype.com Same as mockingbird, Antetype hasn’t been there for long. It is still in beta, a bit buggy and slow mac application. It is however way more powerful than Mockingbird, giving you the possibility to create any interaction effects you might need (mockingbird for example can’t do hover/active states). It is a desktop app so less likely to go down with a server issue. Still not ready for serious prototyping but will get there eventually.

TOOLS THAT’LL HELP YOU START

silverbackapp.com Silverback is a desktop application that captures screen activity, videos the tester’s face and records tester’s voice. Brilliant tool for moderated qualitative tests. Mac only. Don’t have a mac? There’s Userﬂy…

userﬂy.com …with Userﬂy you can target you real user, capture screen activity, record voice and video od your real users too. You can’t moderate your test though.

verifyapp.com VERIFY is amazing. For 9$ per month you get an excellent tool to do remote quantitative testing. If you’re interested in demographic proﬁle of your users you can also go Pro for a few extra dollars. That said, it’s totally worth it. And if you want, you can share one account with your friends or colleagues.

verifyapp.com You get A/B tests for choosing between two design concepts, Single and multiple Click tests for seeing where users click based on your instructions, 5 second tests, Labeling tests for making users label elements previously marked by you, Mood tests to make users tell you how they felt about your designs, simple annotation tool.

optimizely.com Optimizely is another brilliant app for testing variations of your pages. With just a single line of code you can create various versions of pages and get real-time statistic data that will help you choose the variation that performs the best. Must see the videotutorial on the site which will blow your brains out.

crazyegg.com CrazyEgg will track clicks on your site and based on those will build a heatmap. Good for quantitative results. Downside: you will know where users click or don’t but not *why*.

QUALITATIVE ≠ QUANTITATIVE Only few tools I mentioned provide you with the qualitative data. As cool as VerifyApp or Optimizely can be I still prefer grabbing my Silverback-equipped macbook and watching real users play with my design. Dada being a big company provides me with a lot of potential testers with different tech advancement levels. But as @Cennydd wrote in his latest book: you can grab your usability testing lab, go to a coffe shop, offer somebody a muffin and a drink in exchange for 20 minutes of his time. As simple as this.

THEN UXLX HAPPENED… I’d like to share with you the one more thing that made an impact on the way I do UI testing was Jared Spool’s uxlx presentation in which he asked this two very important questions:

THEN UXLX HAPPENED… In the last six weeks, have you spent at least two hours watching someone use your or competitor’s design?

THEN UXLX HAPPENED… It is not the number of users that makes a difference as much as the number of hours each team member is exposed to direct user feedback.

THANK YOU Piotr Fedorczyk aka @presentday at User Experience Camp Italia 2010 http://piotrf.pl — http://twitter.com/presentday — ciao@piotrf.pl

On User Interface Testing

by Piotr Fedorczyk on Nov 06, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

2 Embeds 133

Statistics

On User Interface Testing — Presentation Transcript

http://2010.uxcamp.it	132
http://localhost:8888	1