Design Template by Anonymous

Types and History

Different types of usability testing

There are many types of usability testing, many of which can be recorded and used remotely for further research and development of the product. Each type of usability test can correlate to a certain role in your projects framework. For the purposes of this tutorial I only named 6 of the common testing types. Here they are:

• Exploratory
• Comparative
• Assessment
• Validation
• Remote
• Guerrilla

The main characteristics of each of these is different. For exploratory testing, it is an open-ended testing to see unexpected issues and gather the inital feedback of your product. Comparative testing, is comparing multiple versions of your product to determine which will preform the best. Assessment testing is to evaluate specfic needs of the product and make sure they are up to date. Validation testing. This is to confirm that the product meets your predetermined standards, this is usually done at the start of a project with the whole team and project managments. Remote testing: This is just remote testing where you send a user the product and ask them to test it and report back with their findings. The final and most common test is the Guerrila test it is informal and spontaneous usually done in public places, and example would be the street etc this is also the cheapest way to conduct testing.

A brief history lesson

The history prior to 1988 was very dull and not used well but in 1988 john whiteside at Digital Equipment corporation with John Bennet as a companion at IBM published a series of chapters explaining the imporance of usability engineering. These early papers showed our general ideas of today to set goals have prototypes and have evaluations with the user data. After this it soon becomes the standard until 2002 where remote usability becomes a thing. At this time Personal computers were becoming a must have at homes and offices meaning you can work on your projects from home or send them to users to test without ever meeting face to face. This would soon become the nation standard as work from home became the norm with covid on the rise in 2020

What is the process to engage usability testing?

In a general sense you should have 5 phases of usability testing. The first being the planning phase, this is where you want to know your objectives with these tests, identify who is going to use the product (users) and choose the methods. Next will be the preperation phase this is where you will develop your scenarios you want tested, find users willing to participate for free or with an incentive. The third will be execution, here you will start conducting your tests have your participants either meet or have completed by a certain date, and document what your findings are with this test. Next is the analysis phase. Here you will review your findings, identify issues or things to touch up on, priotize those improvments and develop a plan to implemnt them. Next we have the implementation phase. This is where you take your findings implement them and possibly do another round of testing if needed and finalize your product.