Moderating usability tests.pdf

Praise for Moderating Usability Tests

Interacting with participants in a calm and neutral manner may well be the most difﬁ cult

part of doing usability testing. Now you no longer have to worry about how to do that.

Just follow Dumas and Loring’s wonderful, practical advice and you will be prepared not

only for typical encounters, but also for the unusual and unexpected, for doing remote

testing, and for working with special populations. Moderating Usability Tests is a great

resource for anyone who interacts with usability test participants.

—Janice (Ginny) Redish, President, Redish & Associates, Inc.

Everyone talks about research methods, but the formal aspects of those methods only

get you so far. The difference between getting a little data or a lot of data, only discover-

ing problems or getting ideas about solutions, bias or validity, throw-away data versus

generalizable insights, often depends on the soft skills—the ability to effectively moder-

ate testing. In the past, you were expected to get these skills through apprenticeships or

trial and error. Moderating Usability Tests removes the mystery and provides practical

advice on how to get the most out of research. It will be invaluable to students learning

about usability testing for the ﬁ rst time, people newly charged with evaluating products,

and even old hands looking to reﬁ ne and improve their technique.

—Arnold (Arnie) Lund, Director of User Experience, Microsoft

You may not think that being a “Gracious Host” is among your assignments in moderat-

ing a usability test, but you will learn why this and other roles with similarly illuminating

names are important to your success. In this generous book, Dumas and Loring give the

beneﬁ t of their decades of experience and astute observation of both the foundational

and the subtle aspects of conducting usability tests. Many questions you didn’t think to

ask until you were on the hot seat are answered here, and will help you achieve a level

of conﬁ dence as a test moderator that may have seemed beyond reach, even if your par-

ticipants are from challenging-to-test populations. With this highly ethical and thor-

oughly grounded program for developing moderator skills and avoiding pitfalls, Dumas

and Loring make a strong contribution to the body of knowledge on testing products.

The big surprise of the book is that their clear, reasoned, and detailed suggestions about

interacting with test participants and developers will likely spill over and improve your

relationships with coworkers, family, neighbors, and friends.

—Elisabeth Bayle, Bayle Collaborations

At this point, virtually everyone in the software industry knows what usability testing is.

An unfortunate side effect of this awareness is that many people are conducting usability

testing who have no idea how to do so in a way that will yield valid, reliable, and useful

data. Other than the design of the test itself, proper and effective moderation of test

sessions is one of the most important—and least understood—aspects of usability testing.

Here is a book by two highly regarded experts that covers this topic thoroughly in a very

readable format. No one who has not already been well trained should attempt to

conduct usability testing without ﬁ rst reading this book cover to cover, and viewing all

the excellent videos the authors provide on the book’s web site.

—Deborah J. Mayhew, Deborah J. Mayhew & Associates

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Moderating Usability Tests

The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies

Series Editors: Stuart Card, PARC; Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft; and Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing,

and Presenting Usability Metrics

Thomas Tullis and William Albert

Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice

of Personal Information Management

William Jones

GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design

Don’ts and Dos

Je Johnson

Visual Thinking for Design

Colin Ware

User-Centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD

Case Studies

Carol Righi and Janice James

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right

and the Right Design

Bill Buxton

Tex t Entry Systems: Mobility, Accessibility, Universality

Scott MacKenzie and Kumiko Tanaka-ishi

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works

Janice “Ginny” Redish

Personas and User Archetypes: A Field Guide for

Interaction Designers

Jonathan Pruitt and Tamara Adlin

Cost-Justifying Usability

Edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew

User Interface Design and Evaluation

Debbie Stone, Caroline Jarrett, Mark Woodro e,

and Shailey Minocha

Rapid Contextual Design

Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and

Shelley Wood

Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New

Conversational Speech Systems

Randy Allen Harris

Understanding Users: A Practical Guide to User

Requirements: Methods, Tools, and Techniques

Catherine Courage and Kathy Baxter

The Web Application Design Handbook: Best

Practices for Web-Based Software

Susan Fowler and Victor Stanwick

The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact

on Society

Richard Ling

Information Visualization: Perception for Design,

2nd Edition

Colin Ware

Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving:

Developing Useful and Usable Software

Barbara Mirel

The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings

and Re ections

Written and edited by Ben Bederson and Ben

Shneiderman

HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Towards

a Multidisciplinary Science

Edited by John M. Carroll

Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes,

and How to Avoid Them

Je Johnson

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide

to User Research

Mike Kuniavsky

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design

and Re ne User Interfaces

Carolyn Snyder

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