Improve your usability test scenarios

Jeff Sauro talks us through seven key considerations when writing scenarios for tasks in usability testing studies.



Hopefully mostly obvious points but a useful primer nonetheless.

Jeff's tips:

• Be specific
• Don't tell the user where to click and what to do
• Use the user's language and not the company's language
• Have a correct solution
• Don't make the tasks dependent (if possible)
• Provide context but keep the scenario short
• Task scenarios differ for moderated and unmoderated testing

So, all very sound advice. If you're planning user testing, I recommend you read this in tandem with David Travis' six approaches to setting tasks.

Motivating usability test participants (previous blog post from December 2010)