Beyond the Usability Lab

Chapter 2. Planning the Study

Adequately planning an online usability study is essential to its success. You need to make some important decisions before designing (Chapter 3) and launching (Chapter 4) the study, including determining its overall goals, budget, and timeline. Each of these will shape what type of study to conduct and will prepare you to move forward. You'll also need to determine who the target users are and decide how to recruit them. Since there will be many more participants than a typical lab study, and they will be working unobserved, it's especially important to carefully plan how to find an appropriate sample of users and how to weed out undesirable ones. This poses a unique challenge for online studies, but one that can ...