The devil is in the details and sometimes he can trip us up.
I have been part of usability testing on the participant side and until this course, never really thought much about what went into preparing on the testers side. I think the Volkside tip to print out your usability test questions is an interesting one.1 Being partial to print myself, having studied literature, and spent many years in direct mail production, there is certainly an added value to having something in hand. Frankly, a shy or bashful tester may misunderstand the question and having it on hand to review may benefit the results of study insuring they are not skewed by miscommunications. This touches on a very important element. Ensuring proper communication to get the results, not only that you want, but that are the entire intention of the study. The nuances of communication and its importance is underscored here.
The Spool Guide to recruiting emphasizes this. “We’ve learned never to assume that we’ve made our instructions absolutely clear.” I think participants understanding the instructions of the task shouldn’t be underestimated. As I am sitting here typing this, I am waiting for an interview, a teaching position, that is possibly full time, to fully pay the bills, and accentuate my part-time and remote teaching gigs that I currently have. We had scheduled the appointment over a month ago, and there was a decision between two locations and the date was in flux, back and forth over the course of the week. I may have misunderstood, as we had shuffled things around.
This situation reminds me of the readings I'm doing while waiting here. It reflects on usability tasks and screeners, and participants showing up. It's no small feat to communicate and have all the logistics mesh. I may be a dingbat here in this case, but in fact, a slight nuance of the arrangements could have led to the misunderstanding. The Spool Advice to confirm again a week before the set time to remind the participant and reconfirmed details would apply as well. Clearly, schlepping here, I want nothing but to be in the right time and place, promptly, as most participants want as well, but a victim of my own enthusiasm. Planning my week around it, like an eager usability tester, still something went wrong. 1 Jussi. Volkside. December 24, 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.volkside.com/2009/12/tip-print-out-your-usability-testing-tasks/.
2 Spool, Jared. Recruiting Without Fear: How to Find First-Rate Participants for Design Studies. 2005 User Interface Engineering.