Testing usability tests for Web Sites an evaluation of task variation in think aloud sessions

摘要

Over the last years, many techniques to evaluate the reading and searching behavior of web users have been developed, and in a lot of them thinking aloud techniques are used. A fundamental discussion, however, about the relation between the use of different variants of thinking aloud tasks is still lacking. To lay a foundation for this discussion I analyzed the results of three usability studies in which different thinking aloud tasks were used: a simple searching task, an application task and a prediction task. The analysis of these studies shows that the task variation influences the results of usability testing and that, consequently, tasks should be matched with the evaluation goals put forward.