Bank Chris, Cao Jerry. The Guide to Usability Testing

UXPin, 2014. — 109 p.The biggest challenge designers and product managers face isn’t how the market or different technologies work — it’s how humans work. What users say versus what users do are two completely different things, and the only way to verify is to test. Usability testing is more than a just a checkbox on a list of product requirements — it is the most convincing support for your design decisions.
Test early and test often. Every company and product is different, so there is no magical usability test that will tell you everything you need to know. Define your hypothesis, pick several quantitative and qualitative methods, and get ready to go out of your comfort zone.
In this book, we’ll share a wide breadth of expert commentary, theories, practices, and real-life examples of usability testing. To name a few, we’ve included advice from usability experts like Jakob Nielsen, Jeff Sauro, David Travis, Joel Spolsky, and many more. We’ll discuss basic concepts like how to plan your usability test. For more experienced readers, we cover scripted testing methods, hybrid testing methods, and the differences between web versus mobile usability tests. Our hope is that it helps you see usability testing as more than just asking people for their opinions on your app or website.
Usability testing helps you see the bottom line of whether your design works or doesn’t. We’ll look at how highly successful companies like Apple, MailChimp, Yahoo, DirecTV, Microsoft, Buffer, among others, used different usability testing tactics that all suited their own unique needs. We’ve also included our own preferences, and outlined how UXPin conducts usability testing.