From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 9:44 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts? To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
(Veering off topic: So what does WMF use for a usability lab, anyway?)
...not sure what Kaldari did. In this case, he may have simply sat down with the UX designers and done a test in person.
We do not have a usability testing lab on-site in San Francisco, and typically prefer to do remote usability tests. Either we do this "manually" via sending out a survey,[1] and then running a Google Hangout which we record for later. This is good since it is guided by the person who wrote the test script, so they can adapt to what the user is doing/failing to do. It takes a lot more leg work though.
More often, we write a testing script and use usertesting.com, which is more automated remote testing and is $35/test (this is really cheap since the going US rate for an in-person test is something like a $50 Amazon gift card). The service uses people from all over the English-speaking world who have a variety of levels of technical expertise, and the tests are recorded for viewing after they're completed.[2]
The UX team is actually in the process of hiring a UX researcher, so expect to hear more about this kind of qualitative research soon.
Steven
1. We recently did this kind of recruitment and testing for article drafts work. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace/Usability_testing and the /Results subpage 2. This kind of testing is something we used during the account creation redesign https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience/User_testing
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