unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

2011/6/26 Søren Heldgaard Olesen <heldgaardolesen@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> It is a bit of a balancing act. On the one hand we want to make sure that
> the participants have a good experience using Ubuntu. We will be handing out
> live CD's to the participants hoping that they might try it out on their own
> computer if they like it. So picking a known usability problem might spoil
> their experience.
>
> On the other hand we want to get interesting and useful results from the
> tests as well. I think that if we do a proper briefing and debriefing of the
> participants it might work out even if we do the tests on a known issue. If
> we tell the participants that this is a known usability problem; your
> response is helping fix it, they might have a good overall experience
> anyway. We might want to do tell them as a debriefing in order to ensure
> that they do not go into the "experiment" knowing there is a usability
> issue.
>

You correctly point out that ensuring they have a "good experience using
Ubuntu" is largely if not completely contradictory to the idea of usability
testing. Sort of like trying to see which flavors of candy people like, but
then hiding the ones that you think they won't like.

How about just pointing out "there are known usability issues, and likely
some unknown ones, and we'd like you to help us figure out what's
noticable", and then seeing which ones actually both people. If you
out-and-out tell them which ones you think are bad, they're likely to focus
on that instead of finding things you're not aware of.

-- 
Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: -= jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx =-