HCMC UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION

HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

 
USABILITY
Instructor: Nguyen Thanh Phuoc
Student 1: Bui Thi Hong Nhung
Student 2: Huynh Quoc Hoang Vuong
 CONTENTS

01 USABILITY TEST

02 ROCKET SURGERY MADE EASY

03 USABILITY AS COMMON COURTESY

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 01

USABILITY TEST

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PROBLEM!

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FOCUS
• A small group (usually 5 to 10)
• Quickly getting a sampling of users’ feeling sand
opinions about things.
• Can be great for determining what your audience
wants, needs, and likes—in the abstract
• Are things you should know before you begin
designing or building anything, so focus groups are
best used in the planning stages of a project

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USABILITY TEST
• About watching one person at a time try to use something

• Good for learning about whether your site works and how to improve it.

• You watch people actually use things, instead of just listening to them
talk about them.

• Should be used through the entire process.

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USABILITY TEST
• If you want a great site, you’ve got to test.
- reminds you that not everyone thinks the way you do
- think about testing is that it’s like travel

• Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none

• Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end

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 02

ROCKET
SURGERY
MADE EASY
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 How often should you test?

• Should spend one morning a month doing usability testing.

Why a morning a month?
 It keeps it simple so you’ll keep doing it.
 It gives you what you need.

 It frees you from deciding when to test.

 It makes it more likely that people will attend.

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 How many users do you need?

• The ideal number of participants for each round of do-it-yourself

testing is three.
• The purpose of this kind of testing isn’t to prove anything.

• You don’t need to find all of the problems.

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 How do you choose the participants?
RECRUIT LOOSELY AND GRADE ON A CURVE

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 How do you find participants?
• There are many places and ways to recruit test participants, like user
groups, trade shows, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, customer forums, a
pop-up on your site, or even asking friends and neighbors.

• Recommend that you download the Nielsen Norman Group’s free

147-page report How to Recruit Participants for Usability Studies

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 Where do you test?
• You need a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted

• You’ll need a computer with Internet access, a mouse, a keyboard, and a

microphone.
• You should also run screen recording software

• You’ll be using screen sharing software

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 Who should do the testing?
• Almost anyone can facilitate a usability test;
• I’m assuming that you’re going to facilitate the tests yourself, but if
you’re not, try to choose someone who tends to be patient, calm,
empathetic, and a good listener.

• Other than keeping the participants comfortable and focused on doing

the tasks, the facilitator’s main job is to encourage them to think out
loud as much as possible

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 Who should observe?

• As many people as possible!

• They suddenly “get it” that users

aren’t all like them.

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What do you test, and when do you test it?

• It’s important to start testing as early as possible and to keep

testing through the entire development process.

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 How do you choose the tasks to test?
• For each round of testing, you need to come up with tasks: the things the
participants will try to do.
• The tasks you test in a given round will depend partly on what you have
available to test.
what they think it is

A rough sketch
them to look at it

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 What happens during the test?
A typical one-hour test would be broken down something like this:

• Welcome (4 minutes).
• The questions (2 minutes)
• The Home page tour (3 minutes)
• The tasks (35 minutes)

• Probing (5 minutes)
• Wrapping up (5 minutes)

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 Typical problems
Here are some of the types of problems you’re going to see most often:

• Users are unclear on the concept.

• The words they’re looking for aren’t there.

• There’s too much going on.

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 The debriefing: Deciding what to fix
• I recommend that you debrief over lunch right after you do the tests,
while everything is still fresh in the observers’ minds.
• FOCUS RUTHLESSLY ON FIXING THE MOST SERIOUS
PROBLEMS FIRST
 Make a collective list.
 Choose the ten most serious problems.
 Rate them.

 Create an ordered list.

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 The debriefing: Deciding what to fix
• Here are some tips about deciding what to fix—and what not to.
• Keep a separate list of low-hanging fruit.
• Resist the impulse to add things.
• Take “new feature” requests with a grain of salt.
• Ignore “kayak” problems.

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The Top Five Plausible Reasons
for not Testing Web Sites

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 03

USABILITY AS COMMON
COURTESY

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WHY YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BE A MENSCH

● Most of this book has been about building clarity into websites:
making sure that users can understand what it is they’re looking
at and how to use it without undue effort. Is it clear to people?
Do they get it?
● There’s another important component to usability: doing the
right thing being considerate of the user. Besides “Is my site
clear?” you also need to be asking, “Does my site behave like a
mensch?”
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WHY WEBSITE SHOULD BE A MENSCH

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THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL
● Definition: Steve Krug coined the
brilliant phrase ‘the reservoir of
goodwill’. The reservoir represents the
amount of effort that a user is prepared
to put into doing something.

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THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL

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 THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL
● There are a few things worth noting about this reservoir:
○ It’s idiosyncratic : Some people have a large reservoir, some
small. Some people are more suspicious by nature, or more
ornery; others are inherently more patient, trusting, or
optimistic

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THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL
● There are a few things worth noting about this reservoir:
○ It’s situational: If I’m in a huge hurry, or have just come from
a bad experience on another site, my expendable goodwill may
already below when I enter your site, even if I naturally have a
large reserve.

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THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL
● There are a few things worth noting about this reservoir:
○ You can refill it: Even if you’ve made mistakes that have
diminished my goodwill, you can replenish it by doing things
that make me feel like you’re looking out for my best interests.

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THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL
● There are a few things worth noting about this reservoir:
○ Sometimes a single mistake can empty it: For instance, just
opening up a registration form with tons of fields may be
enough to cause some people’s reserve to plunge instantly to
zero.

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THE RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL
Good example that a single mistake
that can empty the whole reservoir.

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THINGS THAT DIMINISH GOODWILL
● Hiding information that I want

I want to buy some 2nd game console in nhattao.com and ….

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THINGS THAT DIMINISH GOODWILL
● Punishing me for not doing things your way: Don’t make me
jump through hoops just because you don’t want to write a little
bit of code
● Asking me for the information you don’t really need: Most
users are very skeptical of requests for personal information
and find it annoying if a site asks for more than what’s needed
for the task at hand.

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THINGS THAT DIMINISH GOODWILL
● Shucking and jiving me. We’re always on the lookout for faux
sincerity, and disingenuous attempts to convince me that you
care about me can be particularly annoying. Think about what
goes through your head every time you hear “Your call is
important to us.”

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THINGS THAT DIMINISH GOODWILL
● Putting sizzle in my way. Having to wade through pages
bloated with feel-good marketing photos makes it clear that you
don’t understand—or care—that I’m in a hurry.
● Your site looks amateurish. You can lose goodwill if your site
looks sloppy, disorganized, or unprofessional, like no effort has
gone into making it presentable.

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THINGS THAT INCREASE GOODWILL
● Know the main things that people want to do on your site and
make them obvious and easy.
● Tell me what I want to know: Be upfront about things like
shipping costs, hotel daily parking fees, service outages—
anything you’d rather not be upfront about
● Save me steps wherever you can: For instance, instead of
giving me the shipping company’s tracking number for my
purchase, put a linking my email receipt that opens their site
and submits my tracking number when I click it
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THINGS THAT INCREASE GOODWILL
● Put effort into it

● Know what questions I’m likely to have, and answer them:

FAQs lists are enormously valuable, especially if
○ They really are FAQs, not marketing pitches masquerading as
FAQs.

○ You keep them up to date.

○ They’re candid.

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Thank you for
watching!