USER CENTRED DESIGN PROCESSES

Design & Documentation » User Testing

This should be an ongoing process, feeding forward into the earlier stages of research and feeding back into the design and documentation stage, helping make adjustments, if needed, to a site design.

These tests can be ad hoc, or controlled. I tend to use a Morae set up to view and record user's interactions and reactions in any built version of a site.

Ad hoc user testing

Present users with prototypes, demos, or partially complete sites, and check reactions to design, and note possible changes. This does tend to lead to knee-jerk reactions to individual user's 'missing' parts of the site, though

Controlled user testing

Take a larger sample of users and give tasks, allowing users to navigate unguided and unprompted, even if they fail to complete tasks.

If users don't vocalise what they are thinking, clearly or accurately, you can be left second guessing why they could not complete tasks.