Mobile User Testing

In the past years, we have seen an explosion of interest in development for mobile. Many companies have mobile websites and mobile applications. But how do you make sure that these mobile products are easy to use and satisfy your customers’ needs? The best way to do it is to test your mobile products with real users.

NNG has conducted a plethora of mobile user research studies since 2000, both for our independent research reports and for consulting clients. We've tested the range of platforms from now primitive smartphones to touchscreen phones, tablets, and e-book readers. We'll report the lessons learned from more than a decade of mobile usability studies and save you from making the mistakes that we made in the early years.

The advice in this course is platform independent, which has two benefits:

• It doesn't matter whether you develop for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, or the next platform to come around: you should test your design with users; and the methods for doing so are much the same.
• The methods you learn in this course will help you improve the user experience of any future mobile platform or technologies that may emerge in coming years. Learning good user-research methodology is a way of future-proofing your career.

What You’ll Learn

• The benefits of testing your mobile platform
• How to plan and conduct your mobile user testing:  finding the right equipment, recruiting participants, writing the tasks, facilitating the study session

Note: This seminar focuses on testing software (whether apps or websites), not testing device hardware.

Topics Covered

• What user testing can and cannot tell you
• Setting goals for your user study
• What equipment do you need in order to record mobile studies?
  • Document camera vs. mobile-device camera
  • Apps and software
• Recruiting participants
  • How many?
  • What to include in your screener?
• Conducting user studies in the lab
  • How to make sure your lab is appropriate for mobile testing
  • Structured versus unstructured testing
  • Types of tasks and how to describe them
  • How to interact with the user  
  • Think-aloud protocol