From the course: UX Foundations: Usability Testing

Planning your first test

From the course: UX Foundations: Usability Testing

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Planning your first test

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- Usability testing can be broken down into three stages. You have Pretest tasks, like finding and scheduling participants and working out what questions you need answers to. You have the test sessions themselves and then you have the post session analysis and reporting, where you work out what you learned and decide what to do about it. There are three things you need to focus on getting right for the study, your participants, the tasks you'll ask them to complete for you and the environment you'll use for running the study. By environment, I mean both the physical location, like a conference room or even somewhere like your users' home or office, and also the technology environment. What type of device operating system and so forth you plan on using. By splitting the work out this way, you can easily focus on the important bits at each point in the process without getting overwhelmed. The rest of this course will take you through the Pretest, Test Session and Posttest stages. The Pretest pieces will tell you what you need to do to make sure you have good participants, useful tasks and a suitable environment for running the study. The Test Session pieces will tell you how to be a good session moderator, what your teammates can do to observe the sessions and how to make participants feel at ease. The Posttest pieces will show you how to analyze the information you got from the study and turn it into actionable data that you can use with your team in order to make changes to your product.

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