Full usability tests incorporate extensive technology use, such as screen capture, video, and audio recording.  For the majority of cases, these extra things are not necessary to produce useful results and they increase the cost.  Taking detailed notes during a micro usability test can be just as effective for identifying user reactions, etc.

Micro usability testing might not be able to provide results as detailed as full usability tests, but honestly when you are looking for such specific data (eye tracking, etc) your company can likely afford the price difference to conduct a full usabilty test.

If you are a small company and just want to learn what users think about your site, micro usability testing notes can easily provide sufficient data to address problem areas with your site.

For example, if your website was intended for use by many different types of users, like an e commerce site, finding participants would be simple because basically anyone would work.  Just having the basic overview of your site’s problem areas would be really helpful and micro usability testing would be a lot cheaper and simpler than doing a full blown usability test, with similar results.

For example, it is difficult to design an experiment to determine how effective a search bar is, because there is no definitive statistics related to it.  You would have to go through a series of comparisons of other numbers, like comparing clicks on links deep within a page versus shallower links to see if people had gotten to them using search.

I’m sure with more practice, it would become easier to design experiments because you would know what combination of analytic tools work well together to determine some problem.

We ended up using the script and logging forms that we made for the in class test, which made things easier.  We then thought of a few tasks that our participants would complete, most of which were similar to the tasks from the micro usability test.

Once we had collected our data from the usability testing, we wrote out our results in a report.  It was VERY helpful to have the 622 report as somewhat of a guideline because this report was really involved and had a lot of parts that could have been done/interpreted differently such as the information to include in each section.

in the end, I think a full blown usability test like this one didnt have many advantages over the micro usability test we did earlier.  It seemed like this test was just more formal with a script and written tasks.  Recording the screen wasnt really any more helpful than just taking notes.  I think multiple micro usability tests would have accomplished the same thing that this usability test did, but in less time and with less cost.

Also, the rating scale for the problems is really subjective, and I ended up not having any problems higher than a 3ish, 4 being the highest.  But somebody else may have (and did in class) rate the problems i found differently than i did. Most of what I found were minor aesthetic flaws that could easily be repaired.

The rest of the assignment was normal since all we had to do was describe the problem and possibly offer a solution if we could.

The hard part about writing the scenarios was that I couldn’t really find a huge distinction between context scenarios and daily use, other than the fact that context scenarios are supposed to be more detailed and in depth.  Even looking through Google for context scenarios didn’t turn up much.

This assignment was definitely fun and it was good to use creativity in an assignment.

It was interesting to listen to someone with a different perspective on our product, but he basically told us things we really already assumed.  For example, we figured most people would use Google as a first resource rather than go to a specialized site like Instructables.  But we did find some things the site could do to attract more users, such as offering some sort of reward for contributing to the community (writing articles).  

 I think overall everything went well, nothing unexpected happened and we were able to find out some things about our site from a neutral point of view.  I can see why this type of research would be necessary to make sure you get users’ opinions and catch things that may have been passed over from being to close to the project.

There is actually a lot more thought and strategy that goes into making these websites than i imagined and it was really interesting to compare them and analyze what the creators were trying to accomplish with the different designs.