Today’s Progress:
Usability Testing Lesson:
Today, we had a lesson on usability testing. The session emphasized the importance of ensuring our designs and prototypes are both effective and user-friendly. The key takeaways are:
- Usability testing allows us to identify potential issues and areas of confusion in a design before it becomes a finalized product.
- The process involves asking the intended users of a product to perform certain tasks under observation. This enables us to see where they might encounter problems or feel confused.
- Collecting data from a diverse user base is crucial as different individuals might interact with the product differently.
- The feedback collected from usability testing is a vital resource that can guide us in refining and enhancing our design.
Instruction Creation Activity:
We also conducted an activity that involved creating instructions to guide a user in building a specific object. In our case, we decided to write steps to create a paper plane. We unexpectedly found that it was difficult to write steps to create the paper plane as it had to be specific enough for the user to recreate the plane and simple enough that the steps were not too complex and prevent the user from following or understanding the steps. This exercise highlighted the need for clear and concise instructions that users of varying ages and abilities can follow easily.
Learning points
- Understanding your audience: Knowing whether we are testing on a teenager or an older individual, for instance, is crucial, as it might influence how the instructions are designed and delivered.
- Time taken to learn: Monitoring the time it takes for a user to learn how to use or build the prototype can provide valuable insights into the intuitiveness and ease-of-use of our designs.
- we also learnt the importance of giving the right tasks for the testing such as making it actionable, realistic, specific, in order to obtain the most information from the user, such as their thought process when navigating our website.