Usability Testing

Are you listening to your users? Do you have a deployed product or web site - have you seen how it's really being used? Do you have usability goals - how will you know if you've met your targets? Analyze, design, and develop all you want, but when rubber meets the road, you'll want to see how real users do real tasks with your system. Delphia Consulting's practical usability testing provides real answers.

Structured Walkthroughs

Structured walkthroughs, using our modified thinking-aloud process may be the single most valuable usability engineering method. By verbalizing their thoughts, real people enable us to understand how they view the system, making it easy to identify high-runner candidates for improvement.

What we do

• We'll work with you to define usability goals and any "hot buttons" that concern you
• Use a system that's anywhere from a design on paper to a deployed product. We walk through scenarios with real users
• Capture the user's successes and problems, assumptions and expectations then translate the data into actionable recommendations to improve usability

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluations are done by looking at a system then documenting expert opinions about the interface. Human Factors engineers systematically inspect a product or a design with respect to a set of guidelines or "rules of thumb" (heuristics) applied from the perspective of their intuition and professional experience.

What we do

• With your help, we'll first understand your system and its users
• Our human factors professionals review your system individually, then collectively produce a prioritized list of recommendations

Iterative Process

Good usability testing will bring you great input in a cost-effective way. But to get the greatest payoff, you'll want to include usability testing as a component in the broader usability engineering process.

What we do

• We've found that an iterative approach - design, test, improve, test again - is the best path to cost-effective usability
• We often recommend a heuristic evaluation early in the design cycle. Our experts will catch a great proportion of problems enabling more inexpensive design improvements
• We often recommend structured walkthroughs with real users after initial problems are addressed. Regular people can interact more realistically with the system allowing us to get clear feedback in order to proceed