Enhancing Usability Testing Skills of Novice Testers: A Longitudinal Study
Mikael B. Skov, Jan Stage · 2003
Universal access in web-sites requires dissemination of usability engineering competence to a wide audience in order to make the web-sites useful. Many web-sites have severe usability problems that prohibit effective and successful use. Identification of web-site usability problems in dedicated usability tests is a difficult and challenging task for novice usability evaluators. In this paper, we try to address this issue by reporting from a longitudinal study where we try to train the analytical skills of novice usability testers. The result is that it is possible to enhance novice usability testers ’ ability to identify more usability problems in a test and to describe the identified problems better. Additionally, this kind of training seems to avoid that these novice usability testers will fail the task of identifying usability problems. 1