Tester's Role in Usubility Testing

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Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on January 14, 2009 at 4:59pm

The latest uTest blog was about usablity - had a link to a good article on 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

Not much experience of my own to offer I'm afraid - like many companies, the place where I spent most of my working life didn't consider it and certainly never did any testing of it

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Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on January 14, 2009 at 5:34pm

and of course this site does have a Usability Testing Group

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Permalink Reply by Joel Montvelisky on January 15, 2009 at 10:12am

I think that one of the most difficult things for a tester is to get into the shoes of its user and try to understand what he does and why?

This is specially important since at the end of the day Quality will be measured in the eyes of the user, and it will not be directly linked to the amount of tests you ran or even (and this may surprise a few at the beginning) if the product went out the door with Bugs. It will mostly be based on the fact that the system does what the user expects it to do, and behaves in the way he is expecting it to behave (hence - it's functionality & usability).

A couple of years back we ran into this problem in a company and we looked for an answer. After a lot of thinking we found a number of things that let us improve our work by understanding our customers better. (you can read how we did it on the article).

I think most of the question you posted are answered inside, but the main question is sometimes "how to start"?
It will depend on the organization and additional external factors, but I think it should start by raising a flag and saying that something needs to be done on the respect.
In many places they will return the flag with a note saying "OK, go and do it!".

Good Luck!
-joel

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Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on January 15, 2009 at 11:31am

If you want help raising a flag, show your boss this story about the $300 million button

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Permalink Reply by Sharath Byregowda on January 16, 2009 at 9:19am

Thanks for sharing the article Phil, excellent one.

-Sharath.B

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Permalink Reply by Kate on January 15, 2009 at 5:19pm

Nice article, Joel! I found some interesting points there. I fully agree that it's better to place engineers/testers closer to users within the organization.

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Permalink Reply by James Christie on January 15, 2009 at 12:57pm

You wait ages for a good discussion about usability testing, then two come along together. I went into an extended rant on a related discussion in the Usability Testing Group. I don't think I need to add to my comments there about Discount Usability Engineering etc.

http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/group/usabilitytesting/forum/top...

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Permalink Reply by Kate on January 15, 2009 at 5:15pm

The the main difficulty is that the process of using application as well as its testing are very subjective... Maybe it makes sense that testers also had psychological skills and designer's talent...? :)

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Permalink Reply by Dipan on January 16, 2009 at 9:56am

It is very much true that tester should have good psychological skills to do the better usability testing...As Phil has mentioned about the "$300 million button" article, there everything is working fine but still there is one major design flaw. Every time it is not necessary to test the application to find the bugs or the application is not working....sometimes testers need to think themselves as the real end user and test the application. I can understand it is very easy to say, but to put yourself in other mind and think like him/her is very difficult job. One thing may be easy for me, but I am not sure that same thing would be easy for him/he?. May be I don't bother to do same thing every time, it doesn't mean that other people don't bother. Everything depends upon the human PSYCHOLOGY and to do better usability testing...we need to be good PSYCHOLOGIST...

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Permalink Reply by Joel Montvelisky on January 16, 2009 at 11:07am

I think that we testers are more psychos than psychologists, but this may only be my personal experience :o?

Now seriously, I think that the 2 skills we need are OBSERVATION & DETECTIVE skills.
Observation, to be able (whenever we have the chance!) to see how our users really work with our products, and not only to look at them but to catch all the important parts that define their real needs.
Detective Skills, since in most cases we are not able to work with our customers directly, so we need to go looking for clues with the people who are in contact with our users (sales, product managers, support, user forums, etc).

Then again, the most important skill might after all be COURAGEOUSNESS to go to our managers and tell them that even if our Apps do all they should they still suck in the way they do it...

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Permalink Reply by Joel Montvelisky on January 17, 2009 at 4:33pm

Just a short note, this weekend I read a book called Why Software SUCKS... that talks about this specific subject.
Very Recommended.

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Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on January 19, 2009 at 1:00pm

Thanks for the recommendation - added to my list

I've just been reading about The Parable of The Lightbulb

and just read that New phone features 'baffle users' "85% of users reporting they were frustrated by the difficulty of getting a new phone up and working"

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