{"id":1213,"date":"2014-02-13T11:51:07","date_gmt":"2014-02-13T19:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nnlm.gov\/evaluation\/blog\/?p=1213"},"modified":"2019-09-24T10:17:04","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T17:17:04","slug":"interview-tips-talking-with-participants-during-a-usability-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/2014\/02\/13\/interview-tips-talking-with-participants-during-a-usability-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview tips:  Talking with participants during a usability test"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/\">Nielsen Norman Group<\/a> (NNG) conducts research and publishes information about user experience with interfaces.  NNG was an early critic of the troubled &#8220;healthcare.gov&#8221; web site:  &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/articles\/affordable_care_act_usability_issues\/\">Healthcare.gov&#8217;s Account Setup:  10 Broken Usability Guidelines<\/a>.&#8221; recent post (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/articles\/talking-to-users\/\">&#8220;Talking with participants during a usability test&#8221;<\/a>) provided tips for facilitating usability tests that could be very useful whenever you&#8217;re facilitating a discussion or conducting an observation.  When in doubt about whether to speak to a participant, count to 10 and decide whether to say something.  Consider using &#8220;Echo&#8221; or &#8220;Boomerang&#8221; or &#8220;Columbo&#8221; approaches:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Echo<\/strong>&#8211;repeat the last words or phrase, using an interrogatory tone.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Boomerang<\/strong>&#8211;formulate a nonthreatening question that &#8220;pushes&#8221; a user&#8217;s comment back and causes them to think of a response for you, such as &#8220;What would you do if you were on your own?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Columbo<\/strong>&#8211;be smart but don&#8217;t act that way, as in the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt1466074\/\">Columbo<\/a>&#8221; TV series from the 1960&#8217;s and 1970&#8217;s starring Peter Falk.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The full article &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/articles\/talking-to-users\/\">Talking with participants during a usability test<\/a>&#8221; provides audio examples of these techniques that you can listen to.  You can find a large amount of additional information about usability testing on the Nielsen Norman Group&#8217;s web site, such as &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/reports\/how-to-conduct-usability-studies\/\">How to Conduct Usability Studies<\/a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/articles\/usability-101-introduction-to-usability\/\">Usability 101:  Introduction to Usability<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) conducts research and publishes information about user experience with interfaces. NNG was an early critic of the troubled &#8220;healthcare.gov&#8221; web site: &#8220;Healthcare.gov&#8217;s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines.&#8221; recent post (&#8220;Talking with participants during a usability test&#8221;) provided tips for facilitating usability tests that could be very useful whenever you&#8217;re&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/2014\/02\/13\/interview-tips-talking-with-participants-during-a-usability-test\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2959,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ICUo-jz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2959"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6616,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions\/6616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}