We don’t live for press clippings, like some folk do. We just do our best to provide good, quality content to you, our audience, figuring that those people who need to know about us will find us. So, it’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame when we get picked up by the popular press, in [...]

Back in October we had the good fortune to host Dana Chisnell’s popular Virtual Seminar entitled “The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild”, where she told us you don’t have to run usability tests by the book to get great value out of them. Quite a statement considering she (co-)wrote the book!

As usual, we received many more excellent questions that we could deal with during the seminar, so we recorded this podcast.

At last week’s UI13 conference, the buzz was about getting started with usability testing. Folks I talked to had a frequent refrain: their group wants to start with some type of user research, but they can’t afford a full-blown scientific study. Neither the schedule nor the budget would let that happen. That’s why Dana Chisnell’s [...]

UIE Virtual Seminar – The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild With Dana Chisnell of Usabilityworks Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 Time: 1pm ET It’s not clear when “quick and dirty” became a dirty phrase in the usability world. There are those that believe that testing must be scientific, [...]

On one of the member-only lists I hang out on, there’s been a discussion about asking participants in studies to role play in a usability test’s scenario. Instead of saying, “Find information about the costs for summer camps in Vermont” the list member asked if there was a problem with using a scenario like this [...]

Producing a usable design takes time, money, and resources. It also requires an organization’s dedication to focus on usability testing and customer needs throughout the entire design process. Knowing how to sell usability testing will substantially help it get approved and supported by an organization. Most development teams we work with understand the benefits of [...]

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I continue on how to moderate a usability test.

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week’s show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator needs to take on during the session.

This week, I had the great honor of speaking with Dana Chisnell, noted usability expert and principal at Usability Works, a consultancy based in San Fransisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing, a book so fine, I agreed to write the foreword.