ABSTRACT
In usability testing, we place great importance on authentic tasks, real users, and the appropriate fidelity of prototypes, considering them carefully in our efforts to simulate people's real-life interactions with our products. We often place less importance on the data with which we ask participants to interact. Commonly, test data are fabricated, created for participants to imagine as their own. But relating to artificial data can be difficult for participants, and this difficulty can affect their behavior and ultimately call our research results into question. Incorporating users' real data into your usability test requires additional time and effort, along with certain considerations, but it can lead to richer and more valid usability results.
- Brewer, M. (2000). Research Design and Issues of Validity. In Reis, H. and Judd, C. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- FinanceWorks. http://www.digitalinsight.com/Google Scholar
- home/solutions.consumer.pfwGoogle Scholar
- Morae. http://techsmith.com/morae.aspGoogle Scholar
- TurboTax. http://turbotax.intuit.com/Google Scholar
- Quicken. http://quicken.intuit.com/Google Scholar
- Quicken Health. http://quickenhealth.intuit.com/Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Using participants' real data in usability testing: lessons learned
Recommendations
Usability testing with real data
Usability practitioners run the risk of misreading the results of usability evaluations, either identifying false positives when artificial user data interferes with a user's product experience or overlooking real problems when they use artificial user ...
Group usability testing: evolution in usability techniques
Usability testing has a long history. In its early form, it was conducted with many individual participants much like traditional research experiments. With the advent of discount usability engineering techniques, fewer participants were required (5-7 ...
Usability testing: what have we overlooked?
CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsFor more than a decade, the number of usability test participants has been a major theme of debate among usability practitioners and researchers keen to improve usability test performance. This paper provides evidence suggesting that the focus be ...
Comments