Monday, October 1, 2001
Full-day Seminar, 8:30a.m.-5:30p.m.

Most usability professionals learned their skills by reading books on usability testing or by watching someone else prepare and conduct tests. But how do we know that the particular way we learned to do usability testing is still the best way? Until the Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) project, there was little opportunity for usability professionals to objectively compare their various approaches. As it turns out, there are some striking differences in effectiveness.

This seminar gives rare insights into the practical doings of usability professionals, normally shrouded behind walls of confidentiality. This seminar is not based on the personal opinions of one or two instructors but on the practical accumulated experience - both good and bad - of the thirteen professional usability labs who participated in the CUE-1 and CUE-2 projects, conducting controlled usability tests in realistic, industrial settings.

	You Should Attend If
	· you are a usability professional who has conducted a dozen or so tests and you'd like to improve your skills in test planning, scenario design, problem identification, and problem communication. Those with more experience may be familiar with some material but will still benefit by learning from other usability professionals. Although this seminar is not intended as an introduction to usability testing, past participants with no testing experience have rated it highly. Related Seminars If you are interested in this seminar, on Wednesday you might enjoy either: Okay, It's Usable - But, is it Useful? Using the Power of Market Research to Drive the User Experience, or Taking Control Back from the Inmates: Using Goal-Directed ® Design to Create Cool Stuff

Designing a Usability Study
• Methods used in CUE: Inspection, Inquiry and Testing
• The Methodological Effect: How results varied based on methodology used in CUE
• Discount testing methods


Exercise 2: Review Usability Test Tasks
Each group will review some of the usability test scenarios used in CUE-2 for testing www.Hotmail.com. Find problems in the experts' test scenarios!

Tasks and Scenarios
• The Scenario Effect: How usability test scenarios
impact the outcome of a usability study
• Common problems in tasks and scenarios
• What makes a good usability test scenario?

Identifying and Describing Usability Problems
• What is a usability problem?


Exercise 3: Usability Problem Description
You'll review problem descriptions in the CUE reports and identify desirable and questionable elements of a usability problem description. Based on a specific, non-trivial example, we will also discuss guidelines for suggesting usability problem corrections.

Communicating Results
• Various means of communicating results (other than reports)
• The Report Effect: How the usability report can determine the impact your findings have on directing change in the product development cycle
• Checklists: Required characteristics of a usability report
• An example of a usable usability report (for www.TowerRecords.com)
• The KJ Method: Quick and effective usability problem communication without reports
• Communication-in-the-large: The politics of usability

Tips and Tricks
You'll select two of the following topics for an in-depth discussion:
• Finding good test participants
• Performing tests
• Testing intermediate and advanced users
• International usability testing
• Assessing the quality of a usability consultancy

Conclusion
• Critical comments on CUE
• Reactions from participating CUE test teams to the comparative evaluation of their work ("The psychology of usability testing")
• General lessons learned from CUE
• Why exhaustive testing of non-trivial products is impossible
• Prevention is better than cure
• Quality through humility in usability testing

Register online or by calling 1-800-588-9855

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