Talk:Usability testing

message: This is a rather idealized definition that does not take into account the broad diversity of what people do under the label of "usability testing".  In my experience, "usability testing" is a label for a very large number of different techniques for assessing a product.  Even with this narrow definition, there's strong evidence that usability testing practices are so diverse that they aren't comparable, or at least not to the point where it is meaningful to discuss topics such as the appropriate number of test participants.  Certainly, most "usability tests" are not controlled experiments. -- Ronz 15:31, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition used

message: Some of the external links are barely more than self-promotion.  I decided to leave them all, but move the less informative, more promotional ones to the end.  (Ronz 14:10, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm for removing all the external links, adding internal references, and see how the self-promoters respond. Wikipedia:External Links Guide --Ronz 14:52, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Removed everything that didn't fit the External Links Guide. --Ronz 19:04, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Promotional External Links 

message: I moved this from the article because its not encyclopedic and from my perspective misses what usability testing is all about.
Originally contributed by Vmahi9 on 23 November 2006:
Here we check the user friendlyness of the application. There are several sub tests to be followed:
 1. User Interface Testing
    a. Look and Feel of the objects
    b. Alignments
    c. Spell checks
    d. Error messages etc.
 2. Manual support Testing
    a. User Manuals/User Guides.
--Ronz 17:41, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: List of things to test

message: Although usability may be hurt by design decisions there is no evidence that shows they are contradictory. And there is no evidence about designers focusing more on "cool" things than usability. (Mdediana 18:34, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Opinion about designers

message: Donmillion (talk) 16:54, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usability testing versus usability inspection 

message: The people from Intuit may think they were the first people to do usability testing in 1984 but it's patently not true. I set up a human factors laboratory to do this at Digital Equipment in the UK in 1983, and that in turn was modelled on a lab that was set up by Bill Zimmer and John Whiteside at Digital's Spitbrook facility in New Hampshire. There's even a paper by John Whiteside, Dennis Wixon and others on how people use text editors, based on usability testing, that was published in 1982. That was just what was going on in Digital Equipment; when you take into account all the work that was done at PARC, at IBM and other places, I think one can conclude that the Intuit claim is entirely bogus and doesn't really deserve to be in here.
DrJohnBrooke (talk) 15:17, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Claims about "first use of usability testing" 

message: Isn't that Excel(?) plot rather awful?
Using lines instead of dots (or other markers) imo indicates a rather unscientific approach...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.115.114.42 (talk) 15:03, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  That plot? 

message: References 2 - 7, 11, & 13 need to have Titles and Authors preceding the URLs, as in references 9 & 10.
Some of the URLs do not lead to the specific source being referenced (#2), some are duplicated (#'s 7 & 11), and some lead to sites that require membership (#13).
Below is an updated list of those references, with Authors and Titles listed should the URLs cease to function.
2. ^ Baecker, Ronald M. (March 2008)TIMELINES: Themes in the early history of HCI---some unanswered questions
3. ^ Veitch, Martin (April, 1997) Intuit's Scott Cook on users, usability and MS
4. ^ Jerz, Dennis G. (April, 2011) Usability Testing: What Is It?
5. ^ Nielsen, Jakob (March, 2000) Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
6. ^ Andreasen, Morten Sieker; Villemann Nielsen, Henrik; Ormholt Schrøder Jan Stage, Simon (2007) What happened to remote usability testing?: an empirical study of three methods
7. ^ ** Duplicate of reference 9. Remote possibilities?: international usability testing at a distance
8. ^ Gough, Dabney; Phillips, Holly (June, 2003) Remote Online Usability Testing: Why, How, and When to Use It
11. ^ ** Duplicate of reference 5. Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
13. ^ Spool, Jared; Schroeder, Will (2001) Testing Web Sites: Five Users Is Nowhere Near Enough  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.254.70.240 (talk) 14:51, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  References Broken, Duplicated, with no Authors/Titles 

message: Seems the examples of this article are outdated (1982!) it would be great to have more recent examples. (Mulut2017 (talk) 02:00, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that more and contemporary examples would improve the article, but to add a comment: the 1982 Apple design guideline is old, but not outdated. Usability testing, and human-centered design more broadly speaking, is an approach and a process that ought to apply to systems design in general. The fact that it applied to interface design in 1982 and continues to do so in 2017 is pertinent to the article. For this reason, I would not recommend removing the example simply because it is old, though, again, I do see the value of additional contemporary examples. Radiotradition (talk) 16:20, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  More modern examples 

message: UX testing redirects here but is not mentioned at all in article. And opinions how "usability testing" and "UX testing" relate to each other are not entirely clear. Maybe mention this name at all in the page text? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:18, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  vs UX testing