Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India
Duration: Half day
Schedule:
Sunday, 21st March 2010,
Morning
Fee:
Rs. 3,000
Participants: 10-25
Aim
I would like to propose a tutorial on ‘Tips for Effective Usability Testing
in India’. This is based upon my experience working in an agile setting
in an Indian organization that is set in stage 3 of Nielsen’s Corporate
Usability Maturity description. The organization I work in creates Alexa
Top 200 consumer websites where I conduct field and lab-based and summative
and formative usability tests on both prototypes and the released product.
Cultural
differences
i. India has a different cultural system as compared to the west. Its
culture, values and language and ways of working and interfacing with
people are different
from those in the west. The difference is illustrated through Geert Hofstede’s
cultural dimensions.
ii. No book written on usability testing in India- All of the popular books
on usability testing are written by western counterparts and understandably
so,
these are written in context of western users.
Organization differences
i. As an industry member, I would estimate that the vast majority of
Indian organizations are between stages 1 to 4 of Nielsen’s Corporate
Usability Maturity description.
ii. At a stage where usability testing is not formally integrated into the
product development lifecycle, technical capability is only half the contributing
factor
to successfully establishing the usability practice as an essential organ
of the company. The ability to engage with stakeholders in a way that they
continually
offer support to the usability initiative is the other half contributing
factor to maturing the usability practice within the organization. It is
therefore necessary
that technical knowledge has to be supplemented by the addressing of ‘soft’
issues that to tackle organization bottlenecks in order to successfully execute
usability
testing so that value may be derived from it that is recognizable by stakeholders.
Content
Specific to usability testing in India, the tutorial in particular talks
about various practical tips dealing with usability test moderation to
avoid introduction of bias that may occur because of the PDI dimension
(moderator-participant) of Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.
Usability testing can only take place if concerned stakeholders realize its value and see it as an integral part of the SDLC. They ultimately hold the key to deciding how much of a role will usability testing play in the SDLC. Since Indian organizations have a different way of working from MNC’s and foreign firms, the other half of the tutorial will talk about how to work towards successfully demonstrating the value of usability testing into Indian organizations (set in stages 2 to 4 or Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description). It will talk about what challenges may be faced, what mistakes should one avoid, about why business cases and generic deliverable templates don’t work, how to deal with time and budget constraints, and how to deal with attitudes and successfully connect with stakeholders.
Please go through my presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/ConeTrees/tips-for-effective-usability-testing-in-india (slide 13 onwards) to get a brief idea of what the presentation will contain which will not be limited to the content in this presentation.
Who should attend?
Usability engineers and any user experience practitioners who conduct usability
testing of all experience levels.
A short biography of the tutor
Abhay Rautela works as Senior Human Factors Engineer
at a leading internet services company in Noida and is responsible for
planning, execution and oversight of user research and usability evaluation
across projects that mostly include Alexa Top 200 websites. He has conducted
formative and summative usability evaluations on low (paper) to high fidelity
prototypes and the actual product in all phases of the SDLC. He has also
authored usability testing deliverable templates and guidelines and has
defined an optimized usability testing process to streamline the usability
testing process in his current organization, in addition to authoring other
user research deliverable templates.
Abhay has a BA (hons) Multimedia Arts degree with specialization in usability and accessibility from Middlesex University, UK in which he was batch topper. He has around 5 years of experience working in different areas of user experience, most of it being focused on interaction design and usability evaluations and user research. He has conducted trainings in the past on accessibility, streamlining the usability testing process and card sorting at Sapient (a leading international IT consultancy) and InfoEdge (a leading Indian internet services company) in addition to presenting at Bar Camp on usability testing in India.
Abhay has also recently been requested to contribute a chapter for a book on user experience which includes other known contributors who have authored and co-authored UX books.Abhay runs a website on usability engineering (www.conetrees.com) that is featured in AllTop (http://user-interface.alltop.com) along with other authoritative websites on user experience. His articles, posts, UI prototyping libraries and website visual design have been published, featured, included, pointed and showcased in Usability News (BCSCHI), Wireframes magazine, Evolt, Axure prototyping application website, SlideShare front page, Business Week’s Business Exchange and WaSP Interact among other places (http://conetrees.com/content/recognition).
He also runs two websites (that are slowly gaining popularity) for the User Experience community- www.theuxbookmark.com and www.uxquotes.com which he conceptualized, designed and now curates content on. In the past, he was manager of FlashMove, Singapore (world’s first Flash special user group) and presently heads The New Delhi UX Book Club and the SlideShare Web Accessibility group.
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