Usability II Week 2
This week, we learned about moderated usability testing. Moderated usability testing means that you are guiding your participants through the tasks, answering their questions, and replying to their feedback in real time. When a person performs a moderated usability test it is extremely adjustable, questions can be changed even in the middle of a session with a user. This is great when a user is struggling with a problem and you want to get to the source of their frustration.
Although moderated testing can help you dig in more to what a user is thinking about a certain task, problem, or item, without practice, a moderator can accidentally begin to lead a user toward the answers they think they are going to answer and not what they would say organically. This is why unmoderated user testing can be a good choice for some situations. While a moderator is there to help in some situations during a moderated usability test, they should never interfere with the integrity of the test. For example, a moderator should never lead, explain how to do a task, or answer questions about the results during testing. In order to get unbiased results, a moderator needs to be unbiased.
