Chiwah,
There's always a tendency to express usability findings in quantitative terms, which lends the results a factitious air of rigor and reliability. However, if 1 participant out of 10 has a certain problem in a usability test, you really don't know how common it is among the target audience. And if 10 participants out of 10 experience the problem you don't know how common it is either. Neither the numbers nor the recruiting procedures in the standard usability test support generalizations about the population at large or any subset of it. And the testing situation itself is normally sufficiently different from real life that you can't be sure that what you're seeing in the lab isn't your own creation. All of which means you have to use your judgment and work with your team to reach some kind of consensus on what you're going to change in the product once you've seen some people interact with it. Is the problem that one user ran into serious and plausible enough to expend resources to fix it? When trying to answer that question, you might consider the following: - How seriously did this issue impact the overall experience? is it a minor irritant or does it make your product useless altogether whenever it occurs? - Is the problem part of a common task or scenario or is it more of an exception? - Did the participant strike you as a normal, plausible person who was reasonably representative of your users or did you have some reason to suspect the person was an outlier? You might of course always decide you need more data before you do anything about it, especially if it isn't obvious how to fix the problem without giving rise to other problems.. Marijke -------------------- >I don't have a lot of experiences about user testing, but shouldn't it be better if the finding are somewhat qualitative ? >I mean, if a finding councern only one user and never happen to any other users. Would that still be usefull to take it into account ? Chiwah ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
