• Identify practical changes that will significantly improve the results of your projects.
• Identify changes that won't waste your time and money.
• Minimize impractical change requests that come up at the last minute.
• The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
  • Focus your users and the project team on the basic project success.
• If little or nothing can be changed before your project is released, usability testing is still valuable.
  • It's better to be forewarned of likely problems.
  • Training and documentation can focus on what users need to know the most.
  • These results can feed future improvement projects.
    

Core principles for usability testing

• Test the most common and critical uses of the technology.
• Test with people that are representative of the actual users.
• Make the testers feel that they can do no wrong.
• Conduct the test objectively - don't lead the user.
• Use realistic data, user interfaces, and situations.
• Observe with an open mind.
• Look for underlying issues from your test results.
  

Planning the usability test

• Who will work on the planning, the observing, the testing, and the analysis?
• Why did your organization create this technology?
  • The basic business reasons
  • The basic work being supported
  • Answer in non-technical, very succinct, plain language
• Who will use your technology?
  • The most critical user group or groups
  • Important characteristics of these users
• What are you most worried about?
  • What is the brightest "happy day" picture the day after your
    technology is released?
  • What is the worst nightmare?
• Identify what tasks you want to test
  

Write the scenarios

• Refer to example.
• A scenario provides a story and a role for the tester to act on.
• A scenario might test only one task using your technology, or it might test several tasks.
• Include motivation - why someone would perform the tasks.
• Include background information - what they need to know to get the work done.
  • Give them little or no information about how to use the technology.
  • Tell them how to recognize when they have finished the scenario.
• Briefly restate the desired action and results.
• Write and re-write the scenario to make it as short and readable as possible.

• Write down the qualifications of the people you want.
• Get people that are as reasonably close to the real users as possible.
• Finding the right people always involves some compromise.
• If a budget permits, the best resource is a marketing research company who recruits people for focus groups, etc.
• You can try recruiting strangers on your own.
• Other people in your company might be OK, especially customer service representatives.
• Family and friends sometimes work as well.
• Avoid using anyone on the project team, especially anyone involved with the
  screen designs.
• Most testers should receive some kind of compensation or gift.

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