This doesn't have to be just the language that the person conducting the test knows. It goes even further. I remember at least one case where the user could understand English, but couldn't speak it, so he listened to Pau, but replied mostly in Russian, and later I translated the recording.
On a more general and practical note, the test conductor and the user need to converse in a language that they know, but the user interface of the feature being tested can be in another language, which the test conductor doesn't know. It's supposed to be very easy for the test conductor to identify the user interface elements even if they are not labeled in his language.
Needless to say, *any* UI feature should be tested not only in English, and it's perfectly feasible.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2014-03-07 12:19 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com:
On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 9:29 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Steven do I understand correctly that there is no user testing except in English ?
You can only do usability testing (i.e. sit down with a person and listen to them talk, or do it remotely) if you understand their language. Otherwise you're just listening to someone give feedback you can't understand.
Someone multilingual like Pau may be able to do tests in languages like Spanish or Catalan, which I believe he might have in the past. But we almost exclusively test in English because it's our universal working language, and we're usually not designing specifically for non-English projects (at least in my work anyway).
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