A Practical Guide to Usability Testing

After attending this usability testing training course, you will be able to confidently carry out a usability test of your company's product or website. In addition to the course notes, we provide forms and templates that you can adapt for your own usability tests.

This seminar is led by Dr. Philip Hodgson who has over 20 years experience in the field of user-centered design.

Duration

This is a one-day seminar.

Overview

Usability testing is the method of choice for organizations that want to understand how customers use their product, software or website. In contrast to market research methods, usability testing delivers strong predictive value, demonstrating how real people will use the product in the real world.

But there are several different types of usability test, making it difficult for novices to choose a technique. Usability testing is also very different from interviews or focus groups and requires a well-trained test administrator. This workshop provides a practical path through the various methods, helping you pick the right kind of test for your product, showing you how to plan, carry out and analyse a usability test, and describing persuasive techniques for presenting the results to developers and managers. You will also get hands-on experience administering and observing a usability test and gain the kind of practical knowledge that you can’t get from reading a book.

You will learn how to:

• Write a screener to recruit the right test participants.
• Write a usability test plan to get buy-in from management and the development team.
• Develop test tasks that are relevant to your customers and your business.
• Choose the right usability test method for your product and its lifecycle phase.
• Design usability tests that meet international standards in usability.
• Adapt our standard forms and templates for your own tests.
• Moderate usability tests.
• Collect and analyze behavioural data.
• Persuade managers and developers to take action based on your test results.

Detailed lesson plan for this practical guide to usability testing seminar (pdf format, 232 kb).

Here's what people say about this course:

• "I now realize that what we've been calling 'usability testing' only scratches the surface of true usability testing. I'm looking forward to trying out some new techniques!"
• "I really enjoyed the hands-on testing in small groups and finding out how to formally carry out structured tests."
• "The instructor's excellent delivery made a technical subject that much more understandable."
• "Before I did the course I had my suspicions that usability was a little hocus-pocus. Now I'm starting to see the light."
• "A very worthwhile day. I learnt several new techniques that I can apply immediately in my job."
• "It was great to expand my knowledge and pick up new 'tips and tricks'."

This seminar is aimed at:

• Interface designers who want to experience hands-on techniques for testing and evaluating their designs with end users.
• E-commerce developers who want to choose the right usability test for the current product lifecycle stage.
• Project managers who want to manage the usability testing process.
• Marketing managers who want to see samples of usability test reports, usability questionnaires, screeners and other deliverables from usability tests.
• Business analysts who want to use performance-based testing to communicate the cost-benefits of the user experience.
• Website designers who want to learn the kind of practical knowledge that you can't get from reading a book.
• Software developers who want to know how to test their applications during teh design and development cycle.

Questions about the course?

Call us on 312-238-9490 or e-mail your question to info@blueprintusability.com