This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Stop Wasting Time in Usability Tests
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox entry this week, Time Budgets for Usability Sessions, is a worthwhile read. Basic idea is that we spend time in usability sessions asking focus-group or survey questions that would be better spent watching how people use the interface. This has certainly been the case in most MIT usability tests, which suffer from an exhausting list of subjective questions, answered with a rating of 1 to 7.
I do enjoy the post-test debriefings. We're testing in an academic environment, and the people testing are faculty, TAs or students. It's good for us to take the time to hear they have to say - we often get great ideas. It also teaches them more about our work, and they leave more of advocate for our service than they were before the test.
Tags: usability