Empirical study on the use of two remote asynchronous usability testing methods

Abstract

Usability testing is used to ensure that the application can be used by the users and according to the user needs. Basically, there are two usability testing methods: the conventional method and the remote method. In this study, we focus on the remote method (more specifically on the remote asynchronous method).The remote asynchronous method means that the tester and the evaluator of the test result are separated by time and location. Within this method, we compared the use of forum and diary. We analyzed the used of these two methods in remote asynchronous method. The goals of this study are to find out which of these two are more efficient in identifying the usability problems, and the advantages and disadvantages of these two methods. The result of our study shows that the diary enables us to identify more usability problems. Our further analysis shows the reason for this is due to the constant daily exposure to the application during the whole testing process. This also allows the tester to become more familiar with application which leads to a faster time in finishing the test than the forum method.Nevertheless, the number of respondents who were able to finish completely the test scenario using the diary method is less than the forum method. We probed this matter further and found that the reasons are they can be persistence in working on the test every day and/or they just completely forgot to do the test on certain days.