User Testing Redux – Design Perspectives

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Let’s take a few minutes to review your Design Guidelines documentation you developed over last week.

Together with your team, review your paper prototypes to make sure they clearly represent user flows you intend to develop for your project.
Revise your paper prototype as necessary in preparation for usability testing
Make a list of specific things your team would like to observe about how your test users use your prototype

Tester – The one who was going to test the other teams’ prototypes. This person will be asked to “think aloud” while testing the prototypes, to give observers context.
Computer/Device – This person should remain silent and react to the tester’s commands using the paper prototype components. For example, when the tester texts a response to an SMS prompt, the “Device” should swap in the next prompt (tip: be sure to include error messages)
Assistant-computer – In times of need, an “assistant-computer” to give the “computer/device” some extra processing power! (i.e., on-the-fly cutting and pasting of missing GUI elements, SMS prompts or messages).
Observer – This person writes down everything the testers say and do, but especially what they don’t/can’t do or have difficulty with.

Organize your team into the usability testing roles listed above
We’ll cycle around the room 3 or 4 times, rotating roles each time
Between each cycle, make revisions to your paper prototype bsed on the observations of the previous cycle
We want everyone to play each role, and each team should end up with 3 or 4 sets of usability testing observations to use as inputs for refining your prototypes
Did your paper prototype improve with each subsequent cycle?

Together with your team, create a new Google Document and title it “Usability Report v2”
Identify your team and the date on the report
Create a heading called Methodology and write a description of how you conducted your usability tests, including how many rounds of testers were tested. Also include descriptions of the roles team members performed during testing (see the roles listed above)
Create another heading called Objectives and list the specific things your team was looking to validate through the testing
Create another heading called Observations and combine the three or four sets of observations into one master list. Be sure to de-duplicate repeated observations

Add a link to your 2nd Usability Report under your Usability Testing heading, include the date in the link text