Usability Reflections: Moderating Usability Tests

This week’s assignment was to do a scripted usability test with a live human being for practice.

So, this week I got to play test moderator and put an actual live person on the hot seat!

The tasks were:

  1. Create a pizza order with three pies.
  2. Sign up for special offers via email without registering
  3. Submit feedback regarding a problem with the order.

The Takeaway

Be crystal clear on the verbiage of the tasks, especially if they are intended to build upon each other

So, as my participant was trying to figure out how to accomplish #2, it became obvious to me that this was supposed to follow the workflow from #1. The verbiage of the script did not indicate this at all. In fact, it kind of looked like the two had nothing to do with one another.

Eventually, my participant stumbled upon the section of the checkout form that shows the click here if you want us to email you special offers checkbox, but it was only after clicking Checkout—a step that was not specified in Task 1. And of course, as a clueless newbie moderator, I had no idea whether to actually help with this or not.

TL;DR, you should know the beginning and ending states of the application for each task on your test.

If you’re recording, have a list of precompiled information for anything that may be senstive

Else face 3 hours of video censoring to scrub it out… Plus side is that I got a crash course in iMovie this evening…

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