Usability Testing Made Easier
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about usability testing and how it really is pretty straight-forward. A few days later, I conducted an all-day usability test off-site with screened testers for one of our design applications. As expected, we gleaned some really insightful information and confirmed some of the usability problems we had suspected or seen in previous studies. For this given product, the best course of action was for us to do the facilitation ourselves. However, if you manage a website or a web application that is readily available on the web, I have a suggestion to make your usability testing even easier.
As we were looking at options for how to best conduct usability testing for this product, we ran across a service called UserTesting.com. It is a really neat approach to simple usability testing. Here is how it works:
- Create one or more simple tasks that can be accomplished in 10-15 minutes.
- Define the appropriate demographics.
- Decide how many testers you want (probably 3-5).
- Pay $29 per tester.
In return, you get a video of each user “thinking out loud” about their experience as they are going through the task as well as a written summary of any problems they found. Pretty cool!
For many simple applications, this would be a sufficient way to get started with usability testing. I signed up to be a tester just to see what it was like and I get multiple requests each day to be a tester, so it seems like a lot of people are using this service. If anybody has tried it or ends up trying it, let me know what results you get.
