Re: Best Practices for Measuring Usability

Hi, Sandeep,

What you are asking is rather broad--it's almost like asking for a quick
tutorial in best practices for software development. It is difficult to give
you targeted information for such a broad topic in a short period of time.
Have you considered hiring a consultant who has a methodology already in
place? That's a great opportunity to: 1) get your project completed quickly,
and 2) learn from them to develop your own internal methodology going
forward.

That said, there are several excellent texts on usability testing; one that
I have found useful is Jeffrey Rubin's "Handbook of Usability Testing",
which I find to be a good primer on the topic. It includes some templates,
as well.

You can also find great resources on the web site of the Usability
Professionals' Association:  http://www.upassoc.org. Specifically, there is
a nice section on Methods:
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/guidelines_and_methods/

I hope that helps get you started--

Susan Ramlet
Usability Engineer, Enterprise Applications
Medtronic

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 6:02 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello
>
> I Design User Interface while enforcing User Centered Design approach for
> web based products. as the product was under the pilots where management
> have encountered many usability issues with the product ease of use while
> in demo with end users; they now have decided to conduct a usability
> testing before we plan the next release cycle.
>
> As a lead User Experience Designer this comes in my plate and I have less
> then 2 month to provide a report with the issues and solutions to improve
> the product usability (we are targeting at zero learning application) for
> the next release cycle to plan. I plan to conduct the testing with 10
> users per feature based on preset criteria - Task Completion, Errors, User
> Satisfaction and amount of Time to accomplish the task.
>
> I am novice to usability testing and have never conducted it before; I
> would like to learn some of your experiences and learning over the
> subject. If we can share some sample report formats would be a great help.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Best Regards,
> Sandeep Rathod
>
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