What Do Usability Test Moderators Say? ‘Mm hm’, ‘Uh-huh’, and Beyond

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Morten Hertzum
  • Kristina Bonde Kristoffersen
Moderators in usability tests wrestle with the conflicting goals of obtaining relevant information from the users while at the same time avoiding to influence the users in ways that change how they use and feel about the tested system. In this study we investigate what moderators say by categorizing the moderator verbalizations from 12 test sessions. During the test tasks affirmations (38%) were the most common moderator verbalizations, followed by task instructions (32%) and prompts for reflection (16%). In addition, more of the moderator verbalizations during the tasks were closed (31%) than open (14%) and many more were positive (16%) than negative (1%). The moderators verbalized at a lower rate during the tasks than in the part of the sessions before the first task and after the last task. Still, they talked quite a lot. We discuss the content of their verbalizations and the implications of our findings.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNordiCHI2018: Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date2018
Pages364-375
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-6437-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Humanities - Usability evaluation method, Usability testing, Test moderation, Test instructions, Verbal reports, Thinking aloud

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 203624002