Smoke and mirrors: setting the stage for a successful usability test

Salzman, Marilyn; Rivers, S. David

doi:10.1080/01449299408914578

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Rohn [27] portrays a usability engineering group inside SunSoft, which provide support and per-forms usability evaluations across the organization. Several authors describe the use of specialized usability groups/departments employing usability professionals [4,10,14,19,23,29,32]. With this organizational form, there is a manifest need for some form of formalized feedback.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feedback from Usability Evaluation to User Interface Design: Are Usability Reports Any Good?

Nielsen

Overgaard²,

Pedersen³

et al. 2005

Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2005

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This paper reports from an exploratory study of means for providing feedback from a usability evaluation to the user interface designers. In this study, we conducted a usability evaluation of a mobile system that is used by craftsmen to register use of time and materials. The results of this evaluation were presented to the designers in different forms. First, the designers were presented with a traditional usability report. Second, we facilitated a dialogue where the results of the evaluation were discussed. During this process, we collected opinions from the designers on the main strengths and weaknesses of the system. The findings indicate that detailed descriptions of problems and log descriptions of the user's interaction with the system and of system interaction are useful for the designers when trying to understand the usability problems that the users have encountered.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feedback from Usability Evaluation to User Interface Design: Are Usability Reports Any Good?

Nielsen

Overgaard²,

Pedersen³

et al. 2005

Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2005

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In practice, the laboratory set-up can vary quite considerably (Rubin 1994). Although there have been concerns that the presence of other people during usability testing represents a source of stress (Schrier 1992, Salzman and Rivers 1994, Patel and Loring 2001, no attempt has yet been made to evaluate the impact of the testing situation on the outcomes of a usability test in a controlled study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of laboratory set-up in usability tests: effects on user performance, subjective ratings and physiological measures

Sonderegger

Sauer

2009

Ergonomics

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This article examines the influences of situational factors on user behaviour in usability tests. Sixty participants carried out two tasks on a computer-simulated prototype of a mobile phone. Employing a 3 6 2 mixed experimental design, laboratory set-up was varied as a between-subjects variable (presence of facilitator and two non-interactive observers, presence of facilitator or no person present) while task difficulty was manipulated as a within-subjects variable (low vs. high). Performance data, subjective measures and physiological parameters (e.g. heart rate variability) were taken. The results showed that the presence of non-interactive observers during a usability test led to a physiological stress response, decreased performance on some measures and affected the emotional state of test participants. The presence of a facilitator (i.e. a participating observer) also influenced the emotional state of the test participant. Practitioners involved in usability testing need to be aware of undue influences of observers, in particular, if the observers are non-interactive. The findings presented in this paper have implications for the practice of usability testing. They indicated a considerable influence of observers on test participants (physiology and emotions) and on the outcomes of usability tests (performance measures). This should be considered when selecting the set-up of a usability testing procedure.

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Automating regression testing for evolving GUI software

Memon¹,

Nagarajan²,

Xie³

2005

J. Softw. Maint. Evol.: Res. Pract.

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With the widespread deployment of broadband connections worldwide, software development and maintenance are increasingly being performed by multiple engineers, often working around-the-clock to maximize code churn rates. To ensure rapid quality assurance of such software, techniques such as 'nightly/daily building and smoke testing' have become widespread since they often reveal bugs early in the software development process. During these builds, a development version of the software is checked out from the source code repository tree, compiled, linked, and (re)tested with the goal of (re)validating its basic functionality. Although successful for conventional software, smoke tests are difficult to develop and automatically re-run for software that has a graphical user interface (GUI). In this paper, we describe a framework called DART (Daily Automated Regression Tester) that addresses the needs of frequent and automated re-testing of GUI software. The key to our success is automation: DART automates everything from structural GUI analysis, smoke-test-case generation, test-oracle creation, to code instrumentation, test execution, coverage evaluation, regeneration of test cases, and their re-execution. Together with the operating system's task scheduler, DART can execute frequently with little input from the developer/tester to re-test the GUI software. We provide results of experiments showing the time taken and memory required for GUI analysis, test case and test oracle generation, and test execution. We empirically compare the relative costs of employing different levels of detail in the GUI test oracle. We also show the events and statements covered by the smoke test cases.

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Smoke and mirrors: setting the stage for a successful usability test

Cited by 8 publications

References 3 publications

Feedback from Usability Evaluation to User Interface Design: Are Usability Reports Any Good?

Feedback from Usability Evaluation to User Interface Design: Are Usability Reports Any Good?

The influence of laboratory set-up in usability tests: effects on user performance, subjective ratings and physiological measures

Automating regression testing for evolving GUI software

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