Usability Testing talks

Usability testing is a research method in which real people try to complete realistic tasks with a product, a prototype or a competitor’s design while a researcher observes. The goal is to see where people hesitate, make mistakes or misunderstand, rather than to ask what they like.

For UI, UX and product design, usability testing is one of the most reliable ways to find problems before they reach a wide audience. Even a handful of sessions can reveal issues a team has stopped seeing. Testing early with rough prototypes is cheaper than fixing things after launch, and testing on the devices people actually use matters, especially on mobile.

The three talks here run from 2013 to 2015. David Travis presents “The 7 deadly sins of user research” at Northern User Experience in 2014, Craig Sullivan covers “The Myths, Lies and Illusions of Cross Device Testing” at conversions@google in 2015, and Aaron Walter talks about “Connected UX”. Related topics include user research, A/B testing, prototyping and usability. Mobile-device testing is a sub-topic.