Moderating Usability Sessions

In this week’s module we had the opportunity to learn about moderating a usabitly session.  We also learned about the golden rules of moderating.

The Golden Rules of Moderating (from Dumas and Loring, Moderating Usability Tests):

  • Decide how to interact based on the purpose of the test.
  • Respect the participants’ rights.
  • Remember your responsibility to future users.
  • Respect the participants as experts, but remain in charge.
  • Be professional, which includes being genuine.
  • Let the participants speak!
  • Remember that your intuition can hurt and help you.
  • Be unbiased.
  • Don’t give away too much information inadvertently.
  • Watch yourself to keep sharp.

For our assignment, we had to play the role of the moderator in a usability session. We were provided a script as well as tasks based on ordering pizza from Papa John’s online. We had to record the session and upload it to KSUtube (the school’s version of YouTube) for the rest of the class to see.

Going into the session I was super nervous. I practiced the script over and over again. But I still had butterflies. But afterwards I was okay and realize it wasn’t so bad and I think the recording turned out really well.

In the session, a few things caught me off guard. In the ice breaker tasks, my participant pretty much answered all the follow up questions to the task in one fail swoop. Which was different from what I practice and anticipated. So I just ran with it. Another thing that happen was my participant messed up on the order in the first task. She didn’t get the toping correct. I didn’t know if I should have corrected her or not. Especially without making her feel bad. If I was in her position, I would feel bad about messing up. I tried my best to repeat the toppings several times thinking she would catch it but she never happened. I even asked her to check the shopping cart to make sure the all the pizzas were correct but no luck. So I decided just to move on. That was a situation that I really couldn’t predict and didn’t know how to respond.

In my opinion, I thought I did very well. Especially since thought I was going to completely mess up.

One thing I think I could of improved on was asking questions when my participants got stuck. I never knew when it was a good time to interject. Also to put my phone on vibrate it! It went off during the session. luckily my participant didn’t mind and I was able to edit out of the video. we joked about it later on. Overall though it was a great experience. Definitely made me step out of my comfort zone.

-George