Liberating usability testing

ions Many methods can be used to investigate a person’s use of an artifact. If we say that the person’s actual experience of using an artifact at the time of using it is the object of study, then most methods have abstractions or distances away from this object of study. In a survey or questionnaire, the respondent is involved in a reflective process; that is, they are thinking about an event (their use of the artifact) that occurred in the past in a different situation. So there are abstractions in the dimensions of time and place. There is an abstraction in the primary focus of the study in that it is the questionnaire, not the artifact. And there is an abstraction in the cognitive framework in that the respondent is not relating to their own framework, but to the questionnaire designer’s. Table 1 lists these abstractions and also outlines the abstractions in other methods which are typically used to evaluate usability. In a similar way to questionnaires, the typical application of interviewing does not deal directly with a person’s actual thinking, feeling, and actions when using an artifact. Two other common methods used in usability evaluations—heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs—are also distanced from the core focus of the inquiry but are less likely to spill into reification because they do not pretend otherwise. We might expect that the anthropological approach, which has the studying of behavior within context as a distinguishing characteristic, would highlight the mechanism of inquiry within experience. However, people using this approach have their research sensibilities attuned to the complex and fascinating socio-environmental contexts of use [5], not to the precision of a person’s actual experience of using an artifact. Usability testing, however, aims a direct inquiry into the experience of using an artifact while the artifact is being used. From the user’s point of view, they simply relate to their own thinking and experience at the time of using the thing. As consumers with generations of shopping practice, we might also see this inquiry as an everyday type of thing. It is perhaps this marvellous simliBeRAtinG Usability Testing Questionnaire Interviewing heuristic evaluation Cognitive walkthrough usability testing Time No No Yes Yes Yes Place No No No No No Artifact (as primary focus) No No No Yes Yes user Yes Yes No No Yes user’s cognitive framework No Yes No No Yes table 1: Inquiring into the actual use of an artifact: are these methods typically done to the conditions of use? Phil Carter | Auckland University of Technology | phil.carter@aut.ac.nz