{"id":84,"date":"2010-11-26T22:32:14","date_gmt":"2010-11-26T20:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asymaps.wordpress.com\/?p=84"},"modified":"2010-11-26T22:32:14","modified_gmt":"2010-11-26T20:32:14","slug":"usability-testing-is-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/2010\/11\/26\/usability-testing-is-different\/","title":{"rendered":"Usability testing is different"},"content":{"rendered":"

Usability testing is done for roughly the same reason as other kinds of testing: To discover new knowledge about the system under test. In this case knowledge about how users work with the system<\/em>.
\nBut\u00a0Usability Testing is a very different discipline from ordinary system testing.
\nIn my opinion, the one thing that makes usability testing different from system testing is, that it never discovers absolute <\/em>facts about the system.\u00a0
\nInstead,\u00a0a usability test will only say something about how the system works in relation to someone<\/em> – and this someone <\/em>is a person – or persons. And as you have probably experienced several times in your life, real persons aren’t absolute, predictable,\u00a0or static – they’re quite dynamic and you never really know what to expect. Usability testing is a bit like integration testing against a remote system, which keeps changing, even while you test it!
\nAnother aspect is that it’s much more important, yet also more difficult,\u00a0to describe\u00a0the context <\/em>in which the system is to be used and the test is executed in.
\nI’ll illustrate that with a basic example: Many corporations implement systems for internal use which are not really user friendly<\/em>, but since the employees get paid for using them, they don’t mind this – and once they’ve used the system for a few weeks, the system may have become an efficient work tool. An opposite example is most computer games, which are deliberately designed to be inefficient<\/em>, but are usually easy to learn and use. These two systems or applications may be used on the same day\u00a0by the same person, but in different situations, of course.
\nSetting the context is not always possible, though. For example is that most people will only respond to things which they understand: Chances are that if you had\u00a0tested Facebook <\/em>on users in 1995, they wouldn’t like it at all\u00a0because they would not understand what it was to be useful for.
\nEssentially, I feel that the tester must be much more conscious about what he is doing and how it is affeting the test results. I actually believe that the description of the context itself and the way you describe it is as influential on the results you get, as the system and the users themselves.
\nYes, testing usability can be very challenging!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Usability testing is done for roughly the same reason as other kinds of testing: To discover new knowledge about the system under test. In this case knowledge about how users work with the system. But\u00a0Usability Testing is a very different discipline from ordinary system testing. In my opinion, the one thing that makes usability testing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[26,90],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}