Advance Program - Tutorial

21. Improving Your Skills in Usability Testing

Monday, 08:30 - 17:00

Instructors
Rolf Molich, DialogDesign, Denmark
Erika Kindlund, Intraspect Software, USA

Benefits
You will compare your own approach to usability testing with those used by eleven professional labs during controlled usability tests in realistic, industrial settings. This tutorial gives a rare insight in the practical doings of usability professionals.

Origins
This tutorial is new for CHI 2000.

Features

• Gather insight from (good and bad) examples of usability work done by other professional labs
• Improve your abilities in usability test planning, scenario design, and usability reporting
• Improve your abilities in identifying usability problems
• Learn about effective usability problem communication

Audience
Practitioners with experience in running usability tests under industrial conditions. The tutorial is also relevant for teachers of usability methods. While not aimed at novices, novices can get a good look at a number of realistic problems and suggested solutions in practical usability testing.

Presentation
Lecture segments interspersed with group exercises and discussions.

Instructors
Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish consultancy company specializing in usability. He has recently supervised a number of large-scale comparative usability tests of commercial Web sites in order to determine common strengths and pitfalls in design and usability test processes. Erika Kindlund is the lead User Interface Designer at Intraspect Software, a Silicon Valley start-up developing Collaborative Enterprise Portal solutions for the Web. She was a usability engineer for Sun Microsystems, conducting usability studies on emerging web technologies.