Quick and Dirty Usability Testing

Dana Chisnell of UsabilityWorks recently published an interesting article about conducting quick and dirty usability testing. For all of you who read my little blog, which is probably pretty much only my mom (Hi Mom!), then you know how much I believe in useful usability, aka quick and dirty usability. In fact, I have been saying for many years now that doing any usability is better than doing no usability. Of course you have to be careful how you go about doing your “any usability” or you could end up making things worse than they already are! Ouch!

I love this quote from her article:

“You don’t have to do it by the book to get useful data. But it is different data from what you get from a formal method. There are trade-offs to be made. You do have to understand where the data came from and what it means. You can conduct usability tests that are quick, cheap, and generate all the insights about your users and your design that you can handle.”

Usability Trade-offs

As she so well puts it, it’s the trade-offs that you have to be careful about. Following usability “by the book” so to speak, will ensure the usability testing is done with maximum emphasis on accurate results. Doing quick and dirty usability provides results, but you have to assume less accurate results. The smart practitioner should follow-up quick and dirty usability testing with additional testing after the first round of changes has taken place, to ensure the quick and dirty changes actually improved things, vs making them worse.

Personas are Required

Perhaps the biggest potential failure point when conducting quick and dirty usability is observing or testing users who do not match the Persona of your typical user. One of the most important items of conducting usability testing is understanding and documenting quite clearly who the typical users are, and what their critical tasks are, and rolling that information into the form of a Persona. You then find participants who match the Persona. Easy right? Actually, it’s not that easy, because it takes a real understanding of your users to define what a typical user is. If you skip conducting the research to understand your typical users, then the rest of the usability testing is suspect. If you’ve not identified your Persona or Personae, then stop, do not pass Go, and get that done first. I’ll wait here.

Free Usability Participants

As I mentioned in an earlier posting about finding free usability testing participants, you probably have friends and family that represent a typical Persona, especially if you are working with a business to consumer type of web site or application. That does NOT mean that your great Aunt Mary can be used to test the latest teen heartthrob web site, no matter how many tie-dye T-shirts she still wears. Remember that Persona you identified with your research? You need to find friends and family or others that match the Persona.

Conduct Field Usability Research

Speaking of research, just the act of getting out of your cube or office, and observing real users interacting with your site or application is a great way to learn quickly about possible usability issues that should attract further exploration. It may not be practical to have your entire group follow you around as you lurk over the shoulder of a real user, in their environment, conducting real tasks on your website or application. But if you carry around a video camera, and share the results with your team afterward, its almost the same as having your whole team there. Or better yet, take your team out in small groupings, so that each member has a chance to experience watching real users interact with your website or app. You’ll have even more research done, and each team member will have had the experience of observing real users in their environment.

Read more about Dana’s point of view from her article on quick and dirty usability testing.