Usability testing methods

In my previous article I told you about Card sorting. Let’s continue considering usability testing methods.

Contextual Inquiry

Contextual inquiry – a method of structured interviews, which differs from the ordinary, such as journalistic interview, because it has always been built on three basic principles:

• accounting for context in which the studied application is used.
• joint evaluation of the application by the user and the developer.
• focus of evaluation of the application is precisely on its user-friendliness.

Contextual inquiry is one of the alternatives of benchmark testing method, in which comfort is evaluated in the laboratory, not in a familiar user working environment. In the contextual inquiry job, time, motivation, and social factors that affect the user, are the same as in the real world, in contrast to laboratory studies where these factors are controlled by the experimenter.

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