Etan Lightstone — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:48:51 GMT

Great article!
A lot of people out there (as Andrew Maier pointed out) think that a usability study has to take weeks, involve expensive equipment and an interrogation room. I’m glad you’re getting the message out :)

A few comments of my own:

Regardless of how tight your deadline, I think it is an absolute must to at least run one or two pilot tests on internal users. The panic you describe, and the likelihood of having to change tasks (which could compromise your metric data) could be greatly reduced. More importantly, you lower the risk of potentially wasting a participants time (a big nono if you are testing an executive / VP user).

I very much liked the whiteboard strategy, I’ve found that when running a study of my own, stakeholders often run into the room after a session has ended and bounce a million ideas off of me… perhaps I’ll try maintaining a living storyboard throughout the process.

One other thing is, if you find that this is going to be the kind of usability study where developers are likely going to make changes between days of testing, and tasks are likely going to be altered… consider doing a rapid Iterative style usability test . In this kind of test, metrics are charted out in iterations based on changes that happen to the UI that affect specific tasks. My company found this technique to be a powerful tool which blends nicely with a team’s agile development style. Our site has some PDFs on the topic.

—Etan
UX engineer
EchoUser Inc

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Etan Lightstone