Jennifer Grucza

On Wednesday, I conducted my very first ever user test! I got a lot of help from a woman in our office, who works for our parent/sister company, who is actually a trained usability professional (unlike me).

We had six users, who responded to a flyer I posted around our office building. Only three of them actually called me before the day of the test - I was worried I wouldn’t have enough users! Then I started getting a (small) flood of people on the day of the test itself, and had to turn people away. As it was, I was pretty exhausted by the end of the day with only six users. As a software engineer, I’m just not used to talking that much! And the testing requires a much different kind of concentration than the kind you use while you’re coding.

Anyway, it was really an interesting experience. I can’t really say that I got any big surprises - the users didn’t try to do anything totally unexpected or anything. But it was enlightening to see how many of them ignored big areas of the page altogether. When they had a task to perform, they zoomed right in on whatever initially caught their eye and didn’t notice much else.

It’s really helpful to get an outside opinion when you’ve been working on a site for any length of time. And unlike A/B testing, which just gives you numbers without much context, with user testing, you get the rationale and thinking behind what they’re doing, and you can see immediately when they’re getting confused or lost. I definitely hope we do more of these, though not too often - it’s rather tiring!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 12:35 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.