Guerilla Usability Testing

Usability tests are an excellent way of discovering problems with a product or service. Commissioning a dedicated usability lab will provide a high degree of scientific rigour, but comes at significant cost. Time and again then doing any usability testing at all gets sacrificed to commercial expediency.

Guerilla usability testing offers a third, practical, way.

Instead of a single academic evaluation, why not bring your usability testing in-house and run it alongside your design and development process? Two or three quick-and-dirty usability tests will not only provide better results but will also allow you to iterate your product between tests, ultimately leading to a more refined product.

Usability testing needn’t cost the Earth. In fact, there’s no need for all that expensive equipment, a dedicated lab and or even expert evaluators. It’s entirely possible to run a test at your own office, a cafe or even your subject’s home.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is designed for anybody building modern websites or web apps, whether you’re an Information Architect, Interface Designer or Usability professional. As long as you have an interest in your users and want to build better experiences, this workshop is for you.

What will you learn?

By the end of this highly practical day you will be able to:

• plan your own guerrilla usability test
• screen and recruit test subjects
• moderate a usability test
• review the results of usability testing
• turn the results of testing into usable recommendations
• write usability reports and give presentations on your findings