This is a short presentation covering the basics.

1. Will Evans
@semanticwill
Yana Kuchirko
@mslogophiliac

2. “When usability is inherent in the
products we use, it’s invisible.
We don’t think about it. But we
know it’s there.”
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3. Defining Usability:
- International Organization of Standardization
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4. Critical Elements
Specific Context:
Specific Users:
Specific Goals:
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5. The 5 E’s of Usability
Effective:
Efficient:
Engaging:
Error Tolerant:
Easy to Learn:
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7. Evaluation of Product
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9. Types of Usability Testing
Formative
Summative
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10. #AgileUX Process at TheLadders
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12. Establish Test Goals
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13. Determine The Process of Testing
What to test:
Where to test:
How to test:
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14. Define the “Core” Audience
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15. Developing “Personas”
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16. Sample Persona: ‘Todd’
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17. Recruit Participants
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18. Create “real” testing scenarios
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19. Determine type of feedback
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20. Creating Questionnaires
• Allows people to rate overall experience
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21. Creating Questionnaires
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22. Prepare a test schedule
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23. Write a Test Plan
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24. “We are testing the product, not you.”
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25. Moderator’s Script
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26. Being an Effective Moderator
• Open-ended, non-leading questions
beginning with “what” or “how”
(never “why”!)
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27. Think-aloud Process
• Why the participant is taking an action
• What they think about the process
• What they expect to happen (matching
user mental model to system model)
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28. Understanding Your User
• Users are people with a goal which
the product needs to support
• People are in a hurry to reach their goal and they
rarely read text until they come across content
that matches their goal
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29. “We finished testing.
Now what does it all mean?”
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30. What Did We See?
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31. What Does It Mean?
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32. Triangulation Analysis
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33. What Should We Do About It?
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34. Types of Severity Scales
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35. Making Recommendations
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36. Framing Findings: Key Considerations
• Will audience already believe changes
are needed or must you convince them?
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37. Writing a Report
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38. Sample Report

39. Thanks!
Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City
with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information
architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences include
directing UX for social network analytics and terrorism risk modeling at
AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel
search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the
senior information architect, and for Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project
when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
His passions include design and critical theory, postmodernism,
information visualization, psychology, neuroscience, and wine. He lives in
New York, NY, drinks far too much coffee, wears only black, and was
Design Co-Chair for the IxDA Interaction10 conference in Savannah,
Georgia in February, 2010. He also served on the board of directors of the
Information Architecture Institute leading marketing and events.