[IxDA Discuss] aquire usability labrats

[Lada Gorlenko]

SA> If you have coorporate products which you want to test in a
SA> usability lab. Hoewever the products are secret you probably don't
SA> want to test outside users nor you probably want programmers to be
SA> subject of the tests.

User tests are not the only evaluation option; have you thought of
doing expert (heuristic) reviews?

As Mitchell noted, end users and NDAs may not always go together hand
in hand. On the other hand, if you can afford usability experts, they
all will be familiar with NDAs. Granted, expert review is not user
evaluation; however, it is often a solid trade off.

The way we do Expert Reviews in my team:

1. Recruit 5-6 UX experts with different specialisations, such as
graphic design, IxD, software engineering, cognitive science,
accessibility, instruction design, etc. -- whatever is more relevant
to your product. 

2. Prepare usage scenarios and user tasks in the same way as you would
do for user evaluation; supplement them by personas/user profiles.

3. Distribute personas and tasks among experts so that:
-- each persona is covered by at least two experts;
-- each task is performed by at least half of the experts.

4. Ask experts to look at the product from two angles:
-- of their persona
-- of their specialisation.

If you do your prep work right, you'll get pretty good results. This
will not work for interfaces requiring deep knowledge of a specific
domain (e.g., medicine, business process modelling, etc.), but it
works well for general usage products.

Lada