Integrating Usability Design and Evaluation: Training Novice Evaluators in Usability Testing

This paper reports from an empirical study of training of usability testing skills. 36 teams of novice evaluators with an interest but with no education in information technology were trained in a simple approach to web-site usability testing that can be taught in less than one week. The evaluators were all first-year university students. The paper describes how they applied this approach for planning, conducting, and interpreting a usability evaluation of the same web site. We discover that basic usability testing skills can be developed. The student teams gained competence in defining good task assignments and ability to express the problems they found. On the other hand, they were less successful when it came to interpretation and analytical skills. They found quite few problems, and they seemed to lack an understanding of the characteristics that makes a problem list applicable