User Testing Adventure

Student Pre-Reading: How to Run a Cheap, Fast, & Incredibly Useful User Test

Optional Video: Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug: Usability Demo

Small Group Session (30-45 minutes)

Groups of 3 will run through a Task Completion test of each student’s project. For reference: Task completion is when you ask the user you’re observing to perform specific actions in your product. You record whether they’re able to successfully perform the action and what problems they ran into.

Each student should have prepared before the small group session:

• Write out a list of the actions in your system (Refer to the Task Completion Testing section of the Pre-Reading article for tips and examples)

Each student will have the 2 other members of their small group go through their app’s actions and watch carefully (no giving directions, just observe what they do!

Take notes, pay attention to sticky spots where your users were unsure of how to proceed or what to do. These are the areas that will need to be fine tuned to improve usability.

Aim to spend about 10 minutes per project (ie 5 minutes per user with the project owner observing).

Full Group UI Critique (45-60 minutes)

We’ll come back together as a whole group and student can plug into the main classroom screens for feedback on UI (this will not focus on usability, but may touch on it). Remember, UI and UX are two different things even though they are closely related! We’ll discuss color, layout, font choices,