Planning for usability testing

I feel like I have been preparing the ground for weeks although it has only been a few days. Currently we are trying to get the usability testing set up to be run over the next few weeks.

So far all the preparation work is complete and documented. We are going to use the academics here at Loughborough, as we get a good distribution over a number of departments. I have managed to narrow down the potential invitees to one per department. The next step is to invite them all and this is when the whole testing becomes real. I will let you know what happens and how many responses we get and how the testing goes. Hopefully I will not have to do all of the testing myself, we will see if I manage to rope anyone else into running a couple of the sessions for me.

UPDATE:The first three participants for the usability testing have fed back some really good information. There are a lot of commonalities to the information being gathered but also some quite dramatic differences in how they use the system. Lots of the ideas that have been generated will hopefully be able to feed in to the next versions of the WebPA tool. I hope we can remain on track to have the report ready by the end of April beginning of June.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The usability testing is finally getting underway. All of the bureaucratic necessities are out of the way, the academics contacted and the participants flooding in… well three at the moment, but we are half way there.