Josh, At Yahoo!, they treated these types of issues by running a Rolling Study every month -- a usability study where anyone could throw in a topic. Money for this study came out of a central budget rather than from any team's individual budget. There were usually 4-6 topics per test. The upside was that very small questions got tested even if they wouldn't warrant a whole test, or if the team didn't have budget for testing. The downside was that a) recruits couldn't be specific to the users of each project, b) coordination of studies was a very big job, and c) it was frustrating for the person running these studies not to be able to follow the issues through. I'm not sure I'd recommend this.
If small issues come up occasionally, it might be appropriate to tack them on to the end of a test of another topic -- if it only takes a minute or two, that shouldn't be a problem. However, for the question you mentioned below (terminology around pricing, what's your goal? If it's to assess whether users understand the various terms, then lab testing is appropriate; however if, as I suspect, the goal is to find out which term converts best, then a bucket test is the most appropriate way to find this out. One of my clients is currently investigating remote usability services like http://www.usertesting.com/. This could be another solution to small questions, but we haven't tried it yet, so I can't speak to that from experience. In sum, as with anything, it depends on the question you're trying to answer -- but I have found that keeping a running log of small issues and trying to sneak them in to the ends of other usability tests can often work well and be the most time-effective way to investigate these issues. I'd certainly be interested to hear other approaches, though. Hilary Hilary User Experience Hilary Bienstock, Principal [email protected] :: 310.883.5818 :: fax 310.829.2839 ________________________________ From: Josh Evnin <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, February 25, 2010 6:26:46 AM Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Quick & easy methods for usability testing micro-interactions? Hey everybody, I'm looking for suggestions for ways I can usability test some micro-interactions on the site I'm working on. We've worked out a bunch of the big questions - the flow and IA seem to be working, the visual design is adding to the content, and users are enjoying themselves on the site - but a handful of issues regularly pop up that I would like to be able to test out with some users. I'm talking about really little stuff like whether an item with a variable price should be displayed as: "Starting at $5.00" or "$5.00+" or just plain old "$5.00" How do you test the little things as they come up? Do you save them all up until you've got enough to warrant full testing sessions with users, or do you use other methods to knock out these little questions? Thanks! Josh ________________________________________________________________ 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 ________________________________________________________________ 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
