Handbook of Usability Testing


Book Description

Whether it's software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants - no, expects - your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You'll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product's usability, and more.




Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set ...Test!


Book Description

Usability Testing Essentials presents a practical, step-by-step approach to learning the entire process of planning and conducting a usability test. It explains how to analyze and apply the results and what to do when confronted with budgetary and time restrictions. This is the ideal book for anyone involved in usability or user-centered design—from students to seasoned professionals.Filled with new examples and case studies, Usability Testing Essentials, Second Edition is completely updated to reflect the latest approaches, tools and techniques needed to begin usability testing or to advance in this area. Provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to usability testing, a crucial part of every product’s development Discusses important usability issues such as international testing, persona creation, remote testing, and accessibility Presents new examples covering mobile devices and apps, websites, web applications, software, and more Includes strategies for using tools for moderated and unmoderated testing, expanded content on task analysis, and on analyzing and reporting results




Rocket Surgery Made Easy


Book Description

It's been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens. In this how-to companion to Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out a streamlined approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own Web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don't Make Me Think, "It's not rocket surgery".) Using practical advice, plenty of illustrations, and his trademark humor, Steve explains how to: Test any design, from a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functioning Web site or application Keep your focus on finding the most important problems (because no one has the time or resources to fix them all) Fix the problems that you find, using his "The least you can do" approach By paring the process of testing and fixing products down to its essentials ("A morning a month, that's all we ask"), Rocket Surgery makes it realistic for teams to test early and often, catching problems while it's still easy to fix them. Rocket Surgery Made Easy adds demonstration videos to the proven mix of clear writing, before-and-after examples, witty illustrations, and practical advice that made Don't Make Me Think so popular.




Moderating Usability Tests


Book Description

Moderating Usability Tests provides insight and guidance for usability testing. To a large extent, successful usability testing depends on the skills of the person facilitating the test. However, most usability specialists still learn how to conduct tests through an apprentice system with little formal training. This book is the resource for new and experienced moderators to learn about the rules and practices for interacting. Authors Dumas and Loring draw on their combined 40 years of usability testing experience to develop and present the most effective principles and practices – both practical and ethical – for moderating successful usability tests. The videos are available from the publisher's companion web site. Presents the ten “golden rules that maximize every session’s value Offers targeted advice on how to maintain objectivity Discusses the ethical considerations that apply in all usability testing Explains how to reduce the stress that participants often feel Considers the special requirements of remote usability testing Demonstrates good and bad moderating techniques with laboratory videos accessible from the publisher’s companion web site




A Practical Guide to Usability Testing


Book Description

In this volume, the authors begin by defining usability, advocating and explaining the methods of usability engineering and reviewing many techniques for assessing and assuring usability throughout the development process. They then follow all the steps in planning and conducting a usability test, analyzing data, and using the results to improve both products and processes. This book is simply written and filled with examples from many types of products and tests. It discusses the full range of testing options from quick studies with a few subjects to more formal tests with carefully designed controls. The authors discuss the place of usability laboratories in testing as well as the skills needed to conduct a test. Included are forms to use or modify to conduct a usability test, as well as layouts of existing labs that will help the reader build his or her own.




Usability Testing


Book Description

Do you want to improve the usability of your library website, but feel that it is too difficult, time-consuming, or expensive? In this book, you will learn that in-house usability testing on a budget is not only feasible, but it is practical, sustainable, and has the potential to lead to remarkable improvements of the content, design, and layout of your website. Usability Testing: A Practical Guide for Librarians will teach you how to: Make the case for usability testing Define your audience and their goals Select a usability testing method appropriate for your particular context Plan for an in-house usability test Conduct an effective in-house usability test Analyze usability test results and make decisions based on those results Create and implement a plan for ongoing, systematic usability testing Step-by-step instructions, along with a myriad of examples, allow you to use this book as a practical guide, and adapt the techniques for your own context. Techniques are appropriate for libraries of all types, including academic, public, and special libraries.




Usability Testing of Medical Devices


Book Description

Usability Testing of Medical Devices covers the nitty-gritty of usability test planning, conducting, and results reporting. The book also discusses the government regulations and industry standards that motivate many medical device manufacturers to conduct usability tests.Since publication of the first edition, the FDA and other regulatory groups h




Usability Testing for Survey Research


Book Description

Usability Testing for Survey Research provides researchers with a guide to the tools necessary to evaluate, test, and modify surveys in an iterative method during the survey pretesting process. It includes examples that apply usability to any type of survey during any stage of development, along with tactics on how to tailor usability testing to meet budget and scheduling constraints. The book's authors distill their experience to provide tips on how usability testing can be applied to paper surveys, mixed-mode surveys, interviewer-administered tools, and additional products. Readers will gain an understanding of usability and usability testing and why it is needed for survey research, along with guidance on how to design and conduct usability tests, analyze and report findings, ideas for how to tailor usability testing to meet budget and schedule constraints, and new knowledge on how to apply usability testing to other survey-related products, such as project websites and interviewer administered tools.




Don't Make Me Think


Book Description

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it's hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn't read Steve Krug's "instant classic" on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don't be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. Three New Chapters! Usability as common courtesy -- Why people really leave Web sites Web Accessibility, CSS, and you -- Making sites usable and accessible Help! My boss wants me to ______. -- Surviving executive design whims "I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book. Don't Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site. After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book. In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing. If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book." -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards




Remote Usability Testing


Book Description

Usability testing is a sub-discipline of User Experience, and remote testing involves fewer logistics, allows participation regardless of location and is quicker and cheaper to execute than in person studies, but still deliver valuable insights and feedback. This book is your ideal guide to remote usability testing.