Week 6: Writing a Usability Test Plan

On Monday, Robin and I met with Tanya, who does most of the usability testing for the User Experience team.  I quickly showed her the four picker models I've been working on and got a little feedback about getting these user tested.  She said they look fine and wanted to know if we'd like to use customers as test participants.  We agreed that having two customers would be good so that we could get some "real users" to look at these designs, but I'll also be using two people from the iSchool and two internal employees—one who has been using another content management product for years but will be switching over to WEM and another who has used older versions of WEM with a totally different interface.

So this week I have been focused on creating a usability test plan based on my initial designs.  I've been attempting to break them up into measurable tasks and constructing a scenario as a common thread through the test.  Tanya sent me the template they usually use and I have been creating my own based on that in combination with some of the info from the usability testing book I've been reading.  Additionally, I've been figuring out the technology needs required for both recording screen captures of the tests and broadcasting them to remote observers.  Internally, we use Camtasia for recording and Microsoft Live Meeting for online sharing.  I was able to get a Camtasia license and a Live Meeting account so I have been playing around and trying to learn how they work.

To demonstrate the screen capture and to show an example of how the my prototype functions, I created this short video:


The most irritating issue I'm dealing with at the moment is that Balsamiq isn't a prototyping tool, as I mentioned last week.  It is really intended for rapid wireframing of new concepts, not for creating elaborate, clickable mock-ups to demonstrate complex functionality.  I had only used Balsamiq previously for wireframing, not interaction design.  To create prototypes for websites, I would use at least some HTML and run them in a web browser. But, I think that would actually be more difficult for demonstrating a software interface so I am making my way carefully with Balsamiq.

I'm up to 50 different screens for my designs as this sort of prototyping is like painfully slow, single frame animation.  I have to make sure all my links between frames are correct and provide the necessary functionality to replicate something of a working interface.  There is another product called Flairbuilder that can import data files created with Balsamiq (using the .bmml file extension) that I would look into if I need to do more of this kind of prototyping in the future.  For now, I still have a lot of rework to do of the designs to get them in line with my usability test tasks.