[Sigia-l] Website Usability testing

[Mitchell Gass]

At 09:20 PM 5/19/2005, Jiangping Chen wrote:
>Can anyone point me to papers or case studies regarding Website usability 
>testing? We are building a Web database and would like to conduct a 
>usability testing before putting it  into use. Or if you have done Website 
>usability testing before, could you share with me your experience such as 
>number of users for the testing, tasks to perform, questions to ask, and 
>any suggestions?

Jakob Nielsen's recommendations for the number of test participants

   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

are a good place to start. Note that these apply only if

- you're conducting a diagnostic test, where the only goal is to find problems

- you're doing iterative testing, where you find problems, fix them, and 
then test again

- the audience for the design you're testing is homogeneous

- each participant can test all the important aspects of a design during a 
test session

If there are different audiences for a design that have distinctly 
different needs or styles of use, you're likely to need more test 
participants to find most of the usability problems. If a design is large, 
you need more test participants or more or longer sessions with 
participants to cover all the important aspects of the design.

For more on this, see

   http://www.stcsig.org/usability/newsletter/0301-number.html

There's helpful advice about web usability, including usability testing, at

   http://usability.gov/

and more general information about for usability testing at

   http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/index.html

For detailed information about how to conduct a usability test, a good 
source is the book A Practical Guide to Usability Testing by Dumas and Redish

   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1841500208/

Mitchell Gass
uLab | PDA: Learning from Users | Designing with Users
Berkeley, CA 94707 USA
+1 510 525-6864 voice
+1 510 525-4246 fax
http://www.participatorydesign.com/