Customer Reviews

Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set...Test!

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is quite good, perfectly on pair with the green and purple ones (Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests and A Practical Guide to Usability Testing respectively, previous best books on the subject). And this book is much more fresh (both green and purple books was published quite a long time ago for IT standarts).

Sadly, publisher (Morgan Kaufmann) did terrible work on converting this book to Kindle. It really looks awful, it is hard to read, images are randomly cropped or displaced. I have yet to see worse designed Kindle book and I have seen alot.

Still, great deal since you can rent it. For such a price it's probably best introductory book for topic of (more or less) serious usability research.

The author has obviously done (and taught others to do) all three elements of the book's tagline numerous times. Her choice of topics and tone provided a great balance between real-world practicality and hardcore science. Plenty of data-driven examples and tools, how-tos, and an obvious delight in helping the reader prepare for their next usability test. A wonderful reference and in-the-trenches guide.

This book fills a huge gap in usability testing resources. It gives practical, real-world guidance on how to actually perform the gamut of usability testing, from discussion of advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to almost step-by-step suggestions on how to go about it - recruitment, physical setup, planning, preparation, analysis, reporting. Case studies, samples, templates, and questionnaires abound. The issues she discusses in international testing are especially interesting, although not by any means exhaustive - more like pointers to more information, which apparently would be voluminous.

Every budding Ux evaluator/designer should have this book on their shelf.

I had the great pleasure of taking Usability Testing under Dr. Barnum for her graduate course at Southern Polytechnic. We used this book, of course, as the primary text. Dr. Barnum, a tireless end-user advocate and devoted teacher with seemingly limitless energy, secured a real-world client for our class project. Using the effective, low-cost techniques outlined in this book, our small team produced a formal usability report for our client (who was thrilled with the work). I recommend this book to anyone new to the field and those who need a single reference to walk them through each step in the UX testing process.

Heard about usability testing and want to try it yourself?

This book will take you step-by-step through all the key considerations, from thinking about why you want to test through the details of planning, running, and reporting what you find.

The author is a much-loved professor who understands what it is to teach, and to learn. She complements that with practical experience, running a real usability tests for real commercial clients with business problems to solve. So although you'll find plenty of references and academic justification of her approach, this is definitely not an 'ivory tower' that recommends things that are impractical: it's a book that reflects what practitioners do everday, and what you can accomplish yourself if you are prepared to be orderly and thoughtful.

In these days of the world-wide web, we also need to think about how our web sites and products will be used by international audiences - a topic you don't find covered in other books on usability testing, but which is a key consideration throughout this one.

This book is an awesome "how-to" manual for usability testing, from start to finish. I especially appreciate the structured approach, as well as the up-to-date examples (e.g., eye tracking). There are plenty of examples for gathering input -- both qualitative & quantitative -- that can be used as templates for gathering data.

The book is thorough enough to be used as a textbook but practical enough to be used by professionals. Highly recommended!

Usability testing is so important in our web based world. If you are the creator of a website, software or elearning product, you have no idea how the users actually use the it. This gives you plans and ideas on how to conduct the testing, and what to look for as you watch the user experiment and think out loud about the product.

It's a practical, well written handbook of the nuts and bolts of the process.

I have been studying usability and conducting what amounted to heuristic-based usability reviews of interactive software since 1977, though I had no idea that those were the terms to describe what I was doing. I thought I was trying to make PLATO lessons better by applying common sense about what people were likely to understand on the screen.

Years later, I had to convince the Head of Engineering that we needed to change the UI for one of our tools. His position was that if users couldn't figure it out, they were too dumb to be permitted to use our system. It took testing where he could see smart people fail at what he and the engineers thought were simple, obvious tasks to convince him.

Carol Barnum's book combines really good advice on how to test with a pithy review of the principles of user-centered computing, usability, and usability testing. All of it is from a practitioner's point of view, larded with illustrative anecdotes and observations that can only have come with practice. It never tips over into a series of war stories, however.

My only objection is that she spends too much time on those currently-fashionable user personas. I think they're something of a waste of time. If you can't envision your likely users without portraits and a description of what kind of shoes they wear, you are in trouble. But let's let that slide. I'm probably just being a curmudgeon.

If you want a book that shows you, with examples, how to design and carry out usability testing from convincing higher-ups of its value to creating a usability lab (permanent or temporary) to conducting and recording the actual test results and interpreting them, this is it. There's a lot of practical wisdom here, and real guidance as well, with actual examples of some artifacts. You can't do better for a meaty yet breezy practical book that neither bogs itself down with academic issues nor sticks to pieties and generalizations.

I wish I had had a book like Carole Barnum's Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set...Test! 2 years ago. Not only is the book a well laid out and easy to digest manual on how to test for usability of software and hardware, it is a primer on how to help define what usability really means.

This book will really help me to determine if a product is even worth bringing in for a beta group to test and help me define to the users on what usability means for them.

I really liked how Barnum set up the book with a chapter and review but also with the use cases. They were easy to understand and follow. She was technical but not so technical that my mind wandered.

For a person like myself, who works a lot with users and testing for their needs, this was very helpful to me.

This book has some good, easy to understand information on how to get started with usability testing. The writing is written in a way that it's easy to read well into the book without having to stop and re-read to digest the concepts presented. There are some good examples and checklists provided. This book would be a good resource for someone that hasn't done testing before and needs to learn about the whole process and not feel overwhelmed.

I would note that the photos used are so dated and sparse that I feel the book suffers -- I would have a much better opinion of it if it had higher resolution graphics (screen captures of web sites) and photos that looked like they were taken recently and not in the 80s. It's hard to take a book that deals with a technology practice seriously when it looks old-fashioned. Had I picked this up a local bookstore and flipped through it, I don't think I would have purchased it based on the dated feel. Now that I own a copy and have spent time reading it, I do think it has value and would recommend it.