Usability Testing Basics:

Communicating results of an Assessment testing round

Overview: Assessment testing is probably the most common sort of usability testing that you'll do after a project passes the prototype stage, and is also one of the most useful in terms of quickly refining the interface. Like most things, however, it's fairly useless if you can't communicate the results well, i.e., your insights on what went wrong and your suggestions for UI changes to address the problems. Whether you're doing the written report or a presentation, the goals are the same: you need to convince your audience that you did a thorough analysis and found some real issues (vs. just flukes/one-off problems), and then give a compelling analysis leading to potential fixes.

Let's start with a description of what a written report looks like; discussion of live verbal presentation of results is further down.

Written Usability Test Report

In many organizations, you'll be expected to do a written test report for each round/batch of testing that you do. Seeing as not all of the project/implementation team will have been there, you need to get everyone on the same page, then show what you found. Here's an outline of the basic pieces of the story you'll need to tell:

Introduction: Get everyone on the same page

Assessment Testing Intro

Testing Outcomes

Conclusion and Recommendations

NOTE: As you might have noticed, many of the intro sections and information are formulaic; this is a report with a fairly standard structure that will apply to any similar testing process. This is why is pays to come up with a good "template" as you do your first report (Headers, section headings, tables, formatting)...and then you can simply edit this to replace/update "the meat" when writing up reports for future assessment tests!

Verbal Presentation of Usability Testing Results

Creating an effective live presentation of your testing results has essentially the same rhetorical goal as the written report: you have to set the stage, provide clear and convincing evidence of the breakdowns you discovered, and give your recommendations for moving forward. The difference with a verbal presentation is that you have different priorities and focus: where the written report needs to very carefully document everything (as the official record), you goal with the verbal presentation is to get to the meat quickly and efficiently. A huge advantage here is that you have much stronger multimedia support: you can easily throw up screen shots and short clips from your tests...pictures that can save 1000 words.

You have a total of 10 minutes or so; you have to be practiced, clear, and efficient. Here is an outline: