About the Author

Whitney is a frequent presenter and past-President of UPA (Usability Professionals' Association), the Past-Manager and Web Manager for the STC Usability and User Experience (UUX). This year Whitney was recognized for her contributions to the Society and community by being named a Fellow of the STC.

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Choosing the Right Technique - Washington DC Workshop with Whitney Quesenbery

Report by David Dick

The February meeting of the Washington, D.C. Chapter was a workshop given by Whitney Quesenbery on how to choose the “right” usability technique to assure a successful project. There are many usability techniques, and each has its own advantages and requirements. Selecting the right techniques is critical to a successful project. The premise is that there is not “one right way” to do usability.

Whitney began the workshop by asking the audience to brainstorm the tools we use to collect user input and evaluate usability. She wrote each technique on a sticky note. We listed informal usability testing, formal usability testing, heuristic/expert reviews, personas and user profiles, user interviews, contextual inquiries, ethnography, requirements gathering, task analysis, focus groups, competitive benchmarking, remote usability testing, eye tracking, accessibility reviews, card sorting, and surveys. We could have added more, but the board was already covered with sticky notes. She then arranged the tools as they should be used in product life cycle and discussed the merits of each technique and outcomes.

After discussing how each technique supports to the product life cycle, Whitney discussed the resources for a usability test. She broke out the techniques into four categories:

• Time-intensive, but requires minimal equipment (usually a few users)
• Requires time and some expertise
• Techniques that rely on automated tools
• Techniques that need specialized facilities

What should we consider when choosing a usability technique? We need to consider goals, timing, and resources.

• Goals: What we hope to learn
• Timing: Where we are in the product development process
• Resources: Time (both to prepare testing and deadlines for providing recommendations), costs, people (and how many users)

Whitney discussed how the goals for usability activities and users’ goals can drive usability activities, how the timing in a project affects the activities that are useful in making decisions about a product, how resources to conduct test and analyze results can be limited, and the number of users it takes to get good results.

We learned how to find the right test based on the number of participants that we can (reasonably) work with and the stage in the project. Whitney posed several issued to consider such as whether equipment to conduct tests is available and ready to use, how many users are needed, and information about user profiles. Not all usability issues and problems are easy to find. She encouraged us to find what we can the first time, fix it, and retest. Usability testing is a form of continuous improvement, an iterative process that yields results over time.

Whitney emphasized that it is important to be flexible to choose the right technique to get the answers you need. Challenges include finding participants that match the user profile, making tasks as realistic as possible, and getting resources to conduct usability testing.

Throughout the workshop, Whitney used anecdotes and real life examples to support each topic, and invited the audience to share their knowledge and experience. This workshop reminded attendees that usability means many things to many people: a process; a result or characteristics of a product, and a philosophy of designing to satisfy user needs.