Mobile User Testing

How to Run Usability Studies with Mobile Devices

Speaker: Raluca Budiu

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.

NN/g 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

• Please note: This seminar focuses on testing software (whether apps or websites),  testing 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?

• Recruiting participants

• Conducting user studies in the lab

About the Speaker
Raluca Budiu is Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group, where she consults for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, designing interfaces for multiple devices, quantitative usability methods, cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human-computer interaction. She also serves as editor for the articles published on NNgroup.com. Raluca coauthored the NN/g reports on tablet usability, mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children's websites, as well as the book Mobile Usability. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.