A Comparison of two concurrent think-aloud protocols: Categories and relevancy of utterances

This paper discusses the results of an exploratory study that compared type and quality of participant verbalizations experienced from two concurrent think-aloud methods. The speech communication and traditional think-aloud methods were compared in terms of the number of participant utterances spoken and relevancy of those utterances in terms of further usability analysis. Though the speech communication method produced fewer utterances, it produced more relevant utterances than the traditional method. Participants preferred hearing the moderator\u27s acknowledgment tokens in the speech communication condition to the moderator\u27s silence in the traditional think-aloud method. There was a significant difference with how natural participants felt while experiencing the various protocols. These findings suggest that the moderation style has a potential impact on the type of verbalizations produced during usability sessions and on how participants feel about thinking aloud