Portable Usability Labs As User Research Tools

Pete Gordon writes "Do Portable Usability and User Research Labs make sense in the software development life-cycle? This interview (my bias--it's with me, and I have a tool in beta now) covers some of the issues and questions on KDE's news site. I don't have the right answers necessarily, just looking for others input and opinions. Also, here are other links about the subject over the past few months. Info World and Harry's comparison."

Comments

Test, test, and then test some more

[TrebleJunkie]

Usability testing is absolutely essential to producing good software -- I've seen too many applications that left the developers hands and went right to market and were utter crap, because the developers put together what *they* thought people wanted, rather than actually verifying at any point that they were on the right track. (And then, most developers have the nerve to get pissed at the user for suggesting they make changes. Go figger.)

Usability testing also mitigates most of the round-and-round arguments developers will always have between themselves over some feature or another. Instead of butting egos, ask the users.

Portable usability test environments are not all that hard to come by. Here, we use a couple of Windows Laptops with TechSmith's Camtasia to record users sessions. We can take the laptop to them, present them with whatever we're testing, record the sessions, bring them back, play back the sessions, make our notes and changes, and go about our business. It works rather well for us, and it's much more affordable than building a dedicated facility. Much more convenient for the users, too.

Re:Usability

[tonsofpcs]

The only people who don't think that usability is worth measuring are the people you wouldn't want working on UI to begin with.

You mean like certain e-voting-machine producers???
I agree.

Also, reading one of the links on the KDE News article, they suggest 'Why Apple', giving reason that "The Macintosh was the pioneer in providing a Usable Graphical User Interface." This is completely untrue. Xerox made the first GUI, and I believe the first usable GUI was either Intuition (Amiga's Workbench) or GEOS. The original MacOS was not very easily operated imho.
See Wikipedia: History of the graphical user interface

It's called HCI

[Dabel]

It's Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Every year there is a large ACM conference on this called CHI. There are also hundreds of HCI researchers all around the world at some of the top institutions working on problems like this.

Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon have two of the bigger masters programs available. Each program pumps out between one to two dozen people a year who should be well equipped to perform usability testing, among other things.

And you don't need a whole lab. You don't need to videotape often, and you don't need to buy some special software/hardware (you can, and they help, but you can get a lot of mileage from much less). Jakob Nielson and his cohort Don Norman have published a few good books that should be accessible to the uninitiated. Often times, some scribbles on paper are a better choice than prototyping the interface (scribbles usually give you higher levels of feedback, as opposed to "The font is ugly.").

There really are much better sources than articles like this one where people are just discovering HCI methods (not to rag on the article). Do a little google searching (you now have the right keywords: usability, hci), read some books (amazon is bound to have something up your alley), and maybe even ask some people in the field. There's a lot of really cheap, really quick things you can do to help yourself out (lookup Nielson's Discount usability, or you can hire an HCI person onto your team, we're very worth the cost).

BTW: There are many more excellent sources than Nielson, he's just the easiest to cite for applied HCI in a short period of time.