[Foundation-l] Usability study in progress

[John at Darkstar]

I've seen some of the results from "agile testing", it seems like they
have a tendency to lock in on specific suboptimal solution. What is an
acceptable solution on a given limited state.

John

Erik Moeller skrev:
> 2009/3/25 John at Darkstar <vacuum at jeb.no>:
>> Wikipedians should not be used to asses usabillity problems with
>> Wikipedia, this is rule number one if you want to get information about
>> why a newbie has problems with a system.
> 
> I'm not sure about your definition of "Wikipedians" above, but the
> recruiting procedure uses a screening process to recruit _readers_ of
> Wikipedia with no editing experience. Our goal here is to at the end
> of the day make improvements to convert more readers to editors.
> 
>> Ten participants are not nearly enough, they can
>> only give you some clue about the real problem.
> 
> There are different philosophies of usability, including a philosophy
> of agile testing with few test subjects (
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html ). There's general
> agreement that with these kinds of tests, you'll quickly see
> diminishing returns - adding many more people doesn't actually help
> you discover many more problems. Moreover, resources are not infinite:
> finding a good balance in terms of the number of testers allows you to
> conduct more tests later, with the goal of validating whether the
> changes you've made actually have had the intended effect.
> 
> Erik