Usability Testing Exercise

Goals

• Design and facilitate a usability test for your project​
• Participate in a usability test of someone else’s project​
• Leave with at least one usability-related problem you’d like to fix during your last sprint​

Part 1: Define Tasks and Scenarios With your project group (10 minutes)

Please make a copy of this google doc and share it immediately with mlinderman@middlebury.edu. You will write your tasks and scenarios in this document, and I will print it for you to share with your participants.

Start by brainstorming: What are important tasks that users must be able to accomplish in your application?

Define 3-6 representative tasks that users must be able to accomplish in your application, then write a scenario for each task in the google doc.¹ As your write your scenarios, keep in mind the following principles from NN/g’s guide to developing task scenarios:

• Make the scenario realistic
• Make the scenario actionable
• Avoid giving clues and describing steps

Part 2: Prepare Your Environment As an individual (5 minutes)

Some groups may need to have users test features that are not yet deployed. If that is true of your group, now is the time to run pnpm run dev and make sure that your application is ready for your participant to interact with! If some scenarios require that the user is logged in, you may want to log in to prepare the environment (unless logging in is an important part of the scenario).

Part 3: Conducting Your Test With your usability group (10 minutes x 2)

You’ll be assigned to a group to test your project (as a facilitator) or another group’s project (as a participant). After 10 minutes have passed, you’ll swap roles.

Facilitator

When you are facilitating, you should make sure to do the following:

• Set up the laptop for the participant
• Provide the scenario to the participant and read it to them out loud
• Answer any questions that the participant has (sometimes with “Sorry, I can’t tell you that. Please do your best to complete the task.”)
• If too much time has been taken or you are no longer learning anything from the task, stop and move on to the next task
• Take notes on what the participant does throughout the test
  • Do they take the expected actions?
  • Is there anything that appears to frustrate the user?
  • Does anything take longer than expected?

Participant

When you are the participant, you should do your best to complete each task as described:

• Think out loud
• Remember, the product is being tested, not you!

If you have time at the end, solicit feedback from the participant by asking “what was it like for you to complete these tasks?”

Part 4: Reflect With your project group

To get the ball rolling, go around a circle in your group and have each member list the most serious usability problem that they observed during their testing.

Hopefully, some themes will emerge. Spend the rest of the time answering the following question for each of your tasks: Are there any usability problems related to this task that you would like to address during Sprint 3?