Usability Class – Thursday, 3/10/2011
Several things:
1
Check out this article that George found. (I know, and have worked with, Charles Mauro.)
-- http://kotaku.com/#!5780222/cognitive-reverse-engineering-explains-the-incredibleallure-of-angry-birds
2
Correction: One of you sent me a note that implied to me that you thought I was asking you
all to EITHER make a class presentation on your final project OR participate in the Spring
Fling. (Showcase. Whatever.) NO! EVERYONE will make a class presentation – in pairs,
either on 4/21/ or 4/28. You will make a 20-minute (or so) stand-up-front-of-the-room
presentation to me and the class, and to any of the stakeholders of your target project, if you
wish to invite them. Generating a poster for the Spring Showcase, and standing in front of it
and engaging other iSchool students, staff, and faculty, and various visitors (read: potential
employers!) is totally optional and totally additional.
3
Check out this note from Jeff Sauro. Good resource. (I know Jeff.) (Sauro. Mauro. How
odd! Your name doesn’t HAVE to rhyme with “auro” for you to be a usability professional,
but it would help.) You’ll see why I like his list of books.
a. Here are my top 5 most influential papers:
b. http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/five-papers.php
c. and 5 classic books
d. http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/usability-books.php
e. and 25 resources for measuring usability (Books, Chapters, Papers,
Proceedings, websites and Questionnaires)
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/25-resources.php
f. and while we're at it, 7 living legends:
g. http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/living-legends.php
4
Get this. The purpleshirts (the iSchool IT Lab support folk) are scheduling a Morae
shortcourse for late March. Hooray. Watch this space. (No, you are NOT obliged to use
Morae, or the IX Lab, for your usability testing. But you may if you wish.)
5
Here’s a note from Laura Fauro – whoops, no, Faulkner. (I know Laura. Actually, I was on
Laura’s dissertation committee.) It may be of interest to you.
Greetings, to my UT network!
I you know creative technical students, please see the opportunity below. The Usability
Professionals' Association-International has ramped up the volume (and the monetary value of the
awards!) for our annual student design competition. The decision was one of the privileges of being
the conference co-chair. :)
I would love to see some serious burnt orange in the top three who get all expenses paid to the
conference, and chance at the top cash prize. Please forward this out as you can to your on UT
network to get the word out to talented students. All they need is a great idea that can be written up
and presented to the judges.
Thanks so much!
- Laura
Laura Faulkner, PhD
UPA International Conference Co-Chair, 2009-2011
laurafaulkner.consulting@gmail.com
U.S. (512) 964-2323
---------- Forwarded message ---------From: UPA <office@usabilityprofessionals.org>
Date: Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:09 AM
Subject: International Student Design Competition, UPA2011 – Making Life Easy!
To: laurafaulkner.consulting@gmail.com
UPA2011 International Conference
Student Design Competition
Dear Colleague,
Are you or your colleagues teaching a course on User Centered Design this
school year? Do you know students who are interested in applying their
skills to an interesting design problem and competing against their peers
for cash prizes? The UPA2011 International Student Design Competition is
an excellent way to engage students with meaningful and challenging design
problems. Preparing a submission gives your students the opportunity to
create a portfolio piece, and being one of the 3 winning teams allows
participants to set themselves apart from the crowd in an increasingly
competitive job market.
The design challenge this year supports the World Usability Day goal of
“Making Life Easy.” In order to humanize a world that uses technology as
an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, communication,
work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that
serves people first. Making products and services more user-friendly
means making our world work better and our lives easier.
The competition invites student teams to invent a system or create a
concept by following a user-centered design process that makes life easier
for its users. Their solution could use any type of technology and result
in an improvement to the quality of life or ‘make life easier’ for its
users. A submission that also connects to the UPA conference them
“Designing for Social Change” would be desirable, but is not obligatory.
UPA2011 will take place June 21-24 in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the third
year of the UPA International Student Design Competition. This year UPA is
providing an additional travel subsidy for top teams attending the
conference. These type of competitions motivate and energize students to
work on meaningful projects and lead to initiatives that positively
impacted lives of real people. Students who have participated in similar
events have gone on to become active members of their professional
communities.
Submissions of short papers (6 pages maximum) are due April 15, 2011. All
student teams are welcome to submit. Please see full details of the
competition at http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/2011/students/
and don’t hesitate to contact us by email with any questions or comments you may
have.
Thank you,
Ilona Posner, Toronto Canada
Kathrin Hollinger, Munich, Germany
Christian Stoessel, Berlin, Germany
Co-Chairs, UPA2011 International Student Design Competition
Email: iSDC2011@usabilityprofessionals.org
Avoid forgetting, register now:
Early Bird discounted registration is open through March 17, 2011:
https://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_conference/app/registration/edit_package_options
The UPA2011 Program:
https://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_conference/app/schedule/index/for:2011/
Stay at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta:
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/2011/location/hotel/index.html
********************************************************
Join the UPA2011 online community!
UPA2011 on
UPA2011 on
These are the official social networks for the UPA 2011 International
Conference, where you can meet people before the conference and where you
highlight and discuss hot topics in the build up to the conference. Join
us, and help us design the conference together.
********************************************************
Usability Professionals′ Association (UPA)
140 N. Bloomingdale Road, Bloomingdale, IL 60108-1017 USA
Tel: +1.630.980.4997 - Fax: +1.630.351.8490
UPA Website: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org
UPA Conf: http://www.upa2011.org
World Usability Day: http://www.worldusabilityday.org
6
OK, here’s what you really care about -- final project test plans. Recall, I want you to write
the test plan AS THOUGH you were going to do a real, industrial-strength piece of usability
testing. (I.e., describe your user audience.) But then you can run a convenience sample,
NOT representative users.
Here are some links to template test plans – no wait – please just Google “usability test
plan” and you’ll see some templates, examples, etc. Yes, it would be easier for me to just
pick one and say “use this.” No, I don’t want to do that because a) this way you see that
these is no one, accepted model, and b) you will mull over which example/template may
serve your needs best.
And here are a few thoughts about your test plan and subsequent testing:
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I’m doing a blanket IRB form for our whole class. If you wish to subsequently publish your
results (unlikely, if you’re testing a convenience sample), you’ll have to complete a separate,
individual IRB form, retroactively.
It is a good thing to describe in your test plan (and, again later in your report) HOW you
chose your particular tasks to test. If you just picked ‘em out of the air, using your own
common-sense understanding of the site, that’s fine. Just say so.
Note, when you write your test REPORT, you’ll likely start with your test plan, and just turn
all the verbs into past tense. Then add the results and discussion. It’s not quite that simple,
but close.
Some of you have worried (appropriately) about WHERE to start the test participants. Do
you take ‘em to the home page of the site being tested? Or is one of your goals to see if they
look for that site, and can find it if they do? If the latter, I think it is a fine idea to START
the test by NOT mentioning the site in question, but by asking a more general question.
Here’s an example. Say you were testing the New Life Institute site. This Institute provides
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low- or no-cost mental health counseling. It would make sense to say, as the first task, “OK,
you have a friend in Austin who needs some psychotherapy, but he doesn’t have much
money, nor mental health insurance. You decide to go online to see if you might find
someplace for him to go for some help. Show me what you’d do.” Then you see a) if they
know about New Life Institute and go looking for it, b) if they perform a more general
search, and if so what terms they use, and c) if they find the NLI site, in any case. THEN
after that task (whether they were “successful” or not), task 2 might be something like,
“Someone has told you there’s this group in town called New Life Institute. Here’s their
home page. Go find what their fees are.” (Or whatever.) Of course, take care not to
mention NLI in the Informed Consent form, or other pre-test materials. (Indeed, you
MIGHT avoid saying “the website” as it will imply to the test participants that there is ONE
site you’re testing.)
I think this may be an artifact of the test plan templates you’re using, but give some thought
to what measures you actually intend to employ. Are you REALLY going to count
“nonverbal expressions of frustration”? If yes, fine. But I often see students listing a whole
bunch of measures they intend to collect, and then in the test report they list just time on
task, error rates, and particular errors.
As with the tasks, say how you arrived at “measureable usability criteria.” Why have you
decided to declare “failure” if people can’t complete the task in four minutes? Because the
stakeholders say that’s their nickel? Because you observed yourself carrying out the task the
first time, on this and on a competitor site, and that seemed about right? Whatever. Just say
so.
A student asked me, do we tell the test participant that one of the observers is a stakeholder
in the site being tested (perhaps even one of the designers), or do we hide that from them? I
don’t think we hide it. Indeed, I think the right answer might be to say “we” are involved in
the design (so that it doesn’t differentially influence the results when one of you is
interacting with the test participants), but to make it clear that you are interested in making
the site better, and thus in their candid responses.
OK, some writing nits:
o et al. is written just as such – no period after the et, yes period after the al. Et is a
whole word, meaning “and.” Al. is an abbreviation for “alia,” “others.”
o I’m the last person in the world who still cares about this, but “their” is a plural
pronoun. People use it to avoid sexist pronouns. But they use it incorrectly – “The
user . . . their opinion . . . .” The best way to avoid sexist pronouns is to go plural,
when you can – “The users . . . their opinions . . . .” A relatively poor way is to go
passive voice – “The opinion of the user . . . .” I’m fine with “his/her” or “he or
she,” though I know lots of people find this awkward.
o When you use a bullet list, make sure each item has parallel sentence structure (e.g.,
starts with the same part of speech) and completes the sentence appropriately. I
often see things like the following
 Our goals were to see if users could:
 Correctly navigate the site.
 Liked the site.
 Good aesthetics.
o I realize even Time magazine has gone away from the “serial comma” (the comma
after the penultimate noun in a series of three or more), but I think it helps
disambiguate sentences. Plus if it’s good enough for Strunk and White (and on page
2!!– “Thus write ‘red, white, and blue.’”), it’s good enough for me.
7
– A SLIGHT CHANGE IN PLAN! Your test plan is due the Thursday after Spring Break.
(No change, here.) If you will, please bring TWO hard copies, and we’ll spend the last third
of the class period doing some peer reviews of the plans.
If you have ANY questions over the break don’t hesitate to send me an email or call. I’ll be at
SXSW-I. I’ll be the one in jeans and a black t-shirt. (Wink.)
Be safe.
Randolph.