Moderating Usability Tests

Golden rules 1 through 5

Chapter

3

19

In this chapter, we present the fi rst fi ve golden rules for interacting

with test participants. We divided the rules into two chapters to avoid

having a chapter that was twice as long as the others. The choice of

which fi ve rules to put into this chapter was not arbitrary; we believe

that these fi ve are the most important, so we call them our core rules.

Each rule describes an important piece of the foundation on which

effective moderating stands. We expect that other moderators may

have a somewhat different set of rules or may disagree with some of

the details of ours. But the rules provide a stake in the ground ...