Tips and tricks for better usability test recommendations

This paper contributes to the HCI literature on usability practice with insights about the empirical challenges and global emerging practices caused by the advent of agile software development (ASD). In the paper we report from a worldwide study involving 12 usability professionals from 12 different countries. The findings show that the usability professionals share a forced development and innovation in their practice that stem from their clients’ adoption and use of ASD methods. The ASD methods challenge the way usability testing is performed, the abilities of the usability expert, the usability deliverables, and the experts’ assumptions about the importance of validity.

In this paper, we describe various setups that allow usability professionals to conduct effective user studies on mobile devices. We describe the factors relevant when building a solution for mobile device observation and the various designs we worked with in the Google user experience research environment as we iterated to meet changing study needs. We highlight several systems that can successfully be used in an industry environment, including a novel setup that is fully portable, can be used in a usability lab as well as in the field, accommodates a large variety of different mobile devices, and allows for live observation by product teams around the world.