Usability Testing Essentials

8 Analyzing the findings

You’ve finished testing. That was fun, wasn’t it? Exhausting, too, most likely.

Now you have logs, observer forms, participant questionnaires, session recordings, and more to somehow make sense of.

Making sense of it all can be overwhelming, but not if you have a plan. This chapter lays out a plan to help you analyze the findings quickly and make sense of the data. The process of analysis can be broken into three distinct steps, based on these questions:

1. What did we see?

2. What does it mean?

3. What should we do about it?

It’s very important to take these three questions individually, and in this order. Why is this important? Because it is extremely tempting to jump from Step 1 to Step 3 without taking the time to ...