Usability Testing Night with Steve Krug...
Details
As a follow-on to our very popular event on Usability with Steve Krug (https://www.meetup.com/bostonphp/calendar/13701966/), let's have a night where we conduct Usability tests on your own sites in almost a speed dating like format...
What is Usability?
Usability is a measure of the quality of a person’s experience in interacting with content or services. If you're designing and building websites and web applications, then you need to care about Usability. These days, Usability and User Experience are very crucial to success, and can mean the difference between making it or breaking it. I've seen so many sites that fail, only because they did not focus on Usability.
If your still not sure what a Usability test it, then watch this Demo Usability Test (http://www.peachpit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=137602).
How it will work:
We will find 10 members that have sites needing to be usability tested. As an attendee - you will be a Test Participant and/or Test Observer for these sites. Each Test Owner will have their own station with a laptop and chairs. We will cycle you through each test station for 10-15 minutes each for the Usability test. Each attendee can evaluate and partake in as many tests as possible. At the end, we will do a debrief on a few of the sites highlighting what Usability issues were found.
This would be a fun filled, and invaluable experience for those wanting to learn more about usability and testing. Steve Krug will join us, and we will provide "High Quality Snacks" for all testers and participants.
Note:
To make this an effective learning event without it being too crowded, we will need to limit the number of attendees. Also we must ensure that those that RSVP will actually come and not change at the last minute. That is why we are charging atendees $5 for attending. We will use this money to offer food and drinks at the event.
Update: To clarify, here are the roles we have defined for this event:
Site Owner: Someone whose site is being tested. This person will be facilitating the tests for their site.(Site Owners will be coordinated in advance.)
Test Participant: The person sitting at a computer and testing a site; the user.
Observer: The person who is watching the usability test.
We will contact the Site Owners by end of day Friday February 4th about testing their site. Otherwise, those who are registered are welcome to be a participant or observer or both.
Agenda:
6:00 - 6:15 : Doors open, socializing
6:15 - 6:30 : Introductions
6:30 - 6:45 : Test Demo by Steve Krug
6:45 - 8:15 : Let the Testing Begin
8:15 - 9:30 : Highlights, "Now What?", Wrap up
9:30 - ???? : Beers somewhere?