Volunteer for a Usability Study

The Office of Information Management (OIM) develops products for the UW community. While OIM intends for their products to be useful, easy, and satisying to use, the only way to test this is to observe volunteers as they complete real-world tasks with these products. This usability testing is invaluable to us.

If you are part of the the UW community and are interested in helping us improve our products by volunteering for a usability study, please send email to the UCD group.

When will I be contacted?

We invite you to participate when your information matches the characteristics of the intended audience for a product in a current study. This is because we assume that someone who shares our intended audience's general characteristics would also tend to share similar difficulties with our products.

What is a study like?

Typically, we invite you to come to our usability lab in the basement of Mary Gates Hall. For one to two hours (depending on the study), we ask you to use a product while telling us your thoughts as you work. We are interested in how well the product meets your needs and expectations as you move from task to task. After the study, we use the data we collect to help us recommend improvements to the designers or developers.

Where are studies conducted?

Usually we run studies in our usability lab because it is set up to help us easily collect data while observing people interacting with our products. However, sometimes we conduct studies with UW staff or faculty in their campus offices.

What is usability?

A usable product is useful, easy, and satisfying to use.

Usability testing is one of the methods from the user-centered design process. Other user-centered design methods include:

• Heuristic evaluations (expert reviews)
• Surveys
• Focus groups
• Contextual interviews (observing and interviewing users in their work place)
• Participatory design (involving users directly in design)

The goal of all of these methods is to design products that are useful, easy, and satisfying to use.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at usable@u.washington.edu.