Hi all, I am a UI designer for a start up company and I'm conducting a usability test for our web product for the first time.
I've read a few books including "handbook of usability testing" and "a practical guide to usability testing", and I've read a ton of resources online. The product we are testing is a web widget which is going to be integrated in other websites (blogs, portals, etc.). We have a working prototype where we have embedded the widget in a fully functional mocked-up website. We are interested in testing two things: 1- Whether or not people will notice our widget at all and will interact with it 2- Knowing what the widget is, how easily can they use the features the widget offers The success of the product largely depends on the first point. The problem is that its almost impossible to write tasks for that. So I have designed the test to have 2 parts: in the first part, I want to give the user about 10 minutes to free-roam the website, and think-out-loud, to see how long it would take for them to notice the widget. I also want to observe how long it will take for them to interact with the feature, and see if they understand (and use) the features of the widget on their own. In part 2, I will give them particular tasks related to features of the widget and see how well they can interact with the UI (if they haven't figured out by now what the widget is, I will tell them) The only issue is, they might have already done some of the tasks in part 2 when they were free-roaming in part 1, and I'm not sure how to handle that. So, for the usability experts here, do you think this is a good approach? I would definitely appreciate your advice and comments. ________________________________________________________________ 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
