Usability Testing Essentials

4 Understanding users and their goals

By now, you should need no convincing that it’s critical to know who your users are and what their goals are. Of course, you need to know about users and their goals for all aspects of user-centered design, but it’s particularly important in planning for usability testing so that you can recruit the right participants and give them the appropriate tasks.

No need to reinvent the wheel. There’s some excellent research that will give you a basic understanding of users and their goals. You can then apply this information to what you know about your users and their goals with your product.

This chapter is in two parts. The first part focuses on

• what we know about users in general

• what we know about web users ...