Thursday April 18, 2024
+ Usability Testing overview
+ Upload Figma link and type specimen project folder (HTML & CSS)
+ Start to Review your classmates’ projects
+ Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise
+ Usability Testing and Questionnaire review
Homework
+ TBD
+ Work on Final Presentations
+ Continue reviewing class projects

Tuesday April 23,2024
+ Usability Testing Continued

Thursday April 25, 2024
+ Last class
+ Usability testing wrap up

Validating and Testing the Design
In the course of an interaction design project, it’s often desirable to evaluate how well you’ve hit the mark by going beyond your personas and validation scenarios to put your solutions in front of actual users. You should do this after the solution is detailed enough to give users something concrete to respond to, and with enough time allotted to make alterations to the design based on your findings.

User feedback sessions and usability tests are good at identifying major problems with the interaction framework and at refining things like button labels and activity order and priority. They’re also essential for fine-tuning such behaviors as how quickly a screen scrolls in response to turning a hardware knob.

What to test
Because the findings of usability testing are often quantitative, usability research is especially useful in comparing specific design variants to choose the most effective solution. Feedback gathered from usability testing is most useful when you need to validate or refine particular interaction mechanisms or the form and expression of specific design elements.

Usability testing is especially effective at validating the following:

+ Naming: Do section/button labels make sense? Do certain words resonate better than others?

+ Organization: Is information grouped into meaningful categories? Are items located in the places customers might look for them?

+ First-time use and discoverability: Are common items easy for new users to find? Are instructions clear? Are instructions necessary? *note usability testing, by its nature, focuses on assessing a product’s first-time use, a users initial reaction to their first exposure to a product.

+ Effectiveness: Can customers efficiently complete specific tasks? Are they making missteps? Where? How often?

When performing usability testing, be sure that what you are testing can actually be measured, that the test is administered correctly, that the results will be useful in correcting design issues, and that the resources necessary to fix the problems observed in a usability study are available.

Conducting formative usability tests
Essential components of successful formative usability tests:

+ Test late enough in the process that there is a substantially concrete design to test, and early enough to allow adjustments in the design and implementation.

+ Test tasks and aspects of the user experience appropriate to the product at hand,

+ Recruit participants from the target population, using your personas as a guide.

+ Ask participants to perform explicitly defined tasks while thinking aloud.

+ Have participants interact directly with a low-tech prototype (except when testing specialized handware where a paper prototype can reflect nuanced interactions).

+ Moderate the sessions to identify issues and explore their causes.

+ Minimize bias by using a moderator who has not previously been involved in the project.

+ Focus on participant behaviors and their rationale

+ Debrief observers after tests are conducted to identity the reasons behind observed issues.

+ Involve designers throughout the study process

Designers (or, more broadly, design decision makers) are the primary consumers of usability study findings. Although few designers can moderate a session with sufficient neutrality, their involvement in the study planning, direct observation of study sessions, and participation in the analysis and problem-solving sessions are critical to a study’s success.

Designers should lead or manage:

+ Planning the study to focus on important questions about the design

+ Using personas and their attributes to define recruiting criteria

+ Using scenarios to develop user tasks

+ Observing the test sessions

+ Collaboratively analyzing study findings

Tasks and Deliverables
For the next two Days you will be completing your own usability tests for each of your colleagues. Complete a Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise for each of your peer’s projects as well as your own. Make sure you are taking the time to reflect on your own work. After you complete the Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise use the Usability Test and Questionnaire linked below to further test each project.

*Remember to upload your project (type specimen files and Figma prototype file) to the Usability Testing folder inside our class drive

Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise

ROSE: Areas that are working well (successes) The goal is to recognize and commend actions that led to favorable outcomes in the hopes that they’ll be performed in the future.

BUD: Areas of opportunity (opportunities) look for opportunities for improvement and anticipate your potential. 

THORN: (challenges) Identify obstacles that are creating unwanted friction in projects usability.

Usability Test and Questionnaire
use the link here for the Usability Test Worksheet or access the worksheet in our class google drive.