Crowdsourced usability testing: Seriously useful
November 2, 2012 —
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The feedback and the insight you can gain from usability testing are invaluable. To actually see people kicking your tires, or using your website or software in the real world, can bring to light a host of issues that would never crop up in the Q/A stage. Or, worse, that would irritate end users when you least expected.
The good news is that usability testing no longer needs to break the bank. Usability testing services exist that follow the crowdsourcing model. These can provide quick feedback of how your software works in the real world.
Old-school labs
Usability testing has always been a useful but cumbersome exercise reserved for those with deep pockets. In the past, it might have involved engaging the services of a usability lab. A group of testers would be gathered, given instructions, and then filmed with a camera or observed through a one-way mirror to see how they interacted with your product. This was usually followed by extensive interviews, analysis and recommendations that pushed the product back to the beginning of its design cycle. The whole process was time-consuming, contrived in an artificial setting, and very expensive.
Today, usability testing services are offered online and for cheap. These online companies sign up potential testers and match your testing requests with testers who meet your criteria. For each testing engagement, you create a set of test instructions, which are then forwarded to the selected testers.
What you get back is a 20-minute video of the testers actually performing your instructions, with audio of their running commentary as they perform the assigned tasks. The videos you get back are segmented, so you can analyze each step of the instructions you provided.
Intrigued by this new usability testing model, their cost, and our urgent need to validate a new account registration process, we tried out two services: UserTesting and TryMyUI.
We were quite impressed and pleased with the results. By providing a deliberately vague set of instructions to visit our website and download our qTrace screenshot and bug-capture tool, we were able to identify a number of issues and make immediate changes to make the process easier for visitors.
Related Search Term(s): crowdsourcing, Q/A, testing
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