On 30 Oct 2008, at 01:30, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
Maybe my pencil and paper technique is better for early stage testing where there's tons of low-hanging fruit and the videos are better for final testing where there is likely to be more contention and debate over the possible changes.
It's certainly true that producing videos is time consuming, and they aren't necessarily all that useful unless the people responsible for the design can't observe the tests first-hand. (Or unless you need some persuasive evidence to show to a manager or some other exec.)
On the other hand, the ability to easily make videos of people using their applications-- whether a working prototype, or just a paper mockup-- might just encourage people who weren't confident about interpreting the results to do the testing anyway and post the videos somewhere. Then the more experienced members of the community could help them do the analysis (and for that matter, suggest improvements to their testing technique, if appropriate).
When they became more experienced at noticing what's important and asking the right questions, then as you say, the need for video is reduced. That said, one other advantage of video is that you don't necessarily need to take notes (or at least, as many notes) during the test itself, and can concentrate more on the task of facilitation-- having somebody sitting beside them taking notes does make some participants even more nervous than they were to start with, so there's a school of thought that it's better to make your notes later from the video, if you can.
Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
