What do you not need for a usability test?
The list is long.
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You do not need a finished product. Don’t wait. Test early. Test often. Start testing with the old site. Test with paper prototypes. Be informal. Just do it.
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You do not need a special space. If you have access to a usability lab, great! It’s wonderful to have cameras in place, someone to run the tapes, a separate room for lots of observers. But it’s not necessary.
You can do usability testing in a conference room, a hotel room, your kitchen, or the person’s cubicle. A few years ago, I had a wonderful experience testing a web site for pilots in a hangar at an air show.
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You do not need special software. Again, it’s great if you have it. Several excellent programs are available to help you capture video and take notes. They make it easy to create highlight tapes and do instant data analysis. But they are not necessary.
You can take notes with old-fashioned pen and paper. If I’m sitting right next to the participant, I find that a laptop is disruptive. But writing on a tablet PC is okay; that’s like taking notes on paper. And if you are observing from a separate room or sitting at a separate table in the same room, a laptop can be fine. If it has a quiet keyboard, participants are likely to ignore it.
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You do not need videotape. The most common use of videotape is to convince people who don’t yet believe in usability testing or who think that only stupid users have problems with the site. Seeing is believing. If you can’t get people to come observe the test in person (which they should!) – or if you don’t have space and you have too many observers – then, yes, videotape the sessions.
But don’t assume that you’ll go back to the tapes to do detailed data analysis. In most development schedules, there’s no time for that. If you are not videotaping, you may want to audiotape – to capture your participants’ great quotes.
You must ask permission to tape. Here’s a plain language video release you can adapt for your tests.
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You do not need fancy videotaping equipment. Getting a good setup is much less expensive today than it was even five years ago. But I’ve done usability testing with a home camcorder.
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You do not need a formal test report. What you need as a report depends a lot on your organization’s culture and development process. A quick list of findings and recommendations may be all you need. For a discussion of how different companies report usability tests, see the article by Mary Theofanos and Whitney Quesenbery in the Journal of Usability Studies.
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You do not need the participants to come to you. You save time and can schedule more sessions if the participants all come to the same place, but it’s not necessary.If you go to people’s work places or their homes, you also get to see their web set-ups as well as their physical and social environments. So don’t let “people don’t have time to come to do a usability test with us” stop you.
In fact, don’t let any of the typical excuses stop you from doing usability testing – or other user-centered design activities.