In case you haven’t figured this out already, I’m continually updating these pages. Because this field is continually developing, I update the readings etc. each time I teach this course, so I’m continually working on this syllabus. Often when I’m looking for one thing I find resources of interest for other topics for this class. And new resources are always appearing.
Generally, for any topic, read Kuniavsky first, then whatever resources are listed as readings. Because of a lot of this course is about methods and tools, and people in this field present their work in a variety of ways, not all the important resources are readings; e.g., some are videos. Depending on your project (and future activities), you’ll need more depth in some areas than what we are covering in class and the added resources will be useful. So these pages are resources for the class sessions on a topic, but also for your projects and for your future work. (These pages will stay up indefinitely.)
I use the “categories” to indicate what topic a page applies to, so for any topic, always check what’s listed under the relevant categories. For me, putting the resources up and linking them to specific days are two different activities, so there may be resources that aren’t currently linked on the syllabus.
Filed by Nancy Van House at 10:27 am under logistics,Readings Comments Off on About Readings and This Site
New edition has sample forms online — note in particular:
Chapter 05: Test Plans and Designs
A sample test plan including sections for overall objectives, research questions, location and setup, recruiting participants, and methodology.
From Usability.gov: Good templates for a variety of documents for usability testing: test plan, tester scripts, consent forms, note-taker’s guide. As part of a page of usability templates of all kinds.
Reporting
Kuniavsky, ch. 17
Templates from usability.gov — scroll down to Reports.
A list and description of usability testing tools: 24 Usability Testing Tools from W Craig Tomlin — don’t know the author but this list is useful.
Examples
Really good example — Wikipedia study by Bolt | Peters. They use the Wikipedia format for report to/about Wikipedia. Includes links to highlight videos.
These PPT slides by Tullis provide an excellent overview of measurement issues, especially statistical tests and reporting. Too many people in user experience research don’t know statistics!
This may seem like a lot of reading, but some of it is redundant. However, each reading adds something others don’t. Given the importance of working with users for this kind of research, there’s a lot that you need to consider.
These are the UX principles currently being used by developers working onFirefox and other projects in the Mozilla community. We are currently utilizing Bugzilla’s keyword functionality, similar to how current bugs can be flagged as violating implementation level heuristics, like data loss. These principles can be added to any bug tracking that allows bugs to be tagged.
Guidelines
Guidelines are used like checklists as, well, guidelines for design. They can be used for evaluation by assessing a product against relevant guidelines. The best approach is to find or develop guidelines specific to a product domain; the more specific the better.
Guidelines can be developed by looking at good examples — for example, e-commerce guidelines could be developed by examining sites like Amazon.
Good: these are based on large-scale research projects. A PDF manual of the guidelines can be downloaded from this site. Each guideline is evaluated for how well it is supported by research data; can be highly valuable for convincing clients of their legitimacy.
Not so good: the manual violates what I consider the most basic guideline for such material: no date! Most recent material referenced: 2006.
Web Accessibility Initiative (added 9/6/10)
Guidelines for various kinds of content, tools, and applications
Top Ten Myths About Usability, Tom Tullis – very short PPT but true; links to PDF of all of his slides for this presentation. His book is Measuring the User Experience so this presentation and his website are useful for getting a sense of quantitative approaches to user experience.
http://www.usability.gov/methods/index.html Look at this page in particular. Doesn’t exactly match what we’ll be doing, but useful. Click on the links to get a general sense of what these methods cover.
Filed by Nancy Van House at 11:58 am under logistics,Readings