Your documentation team has developed an online help support for instant messaging client. You are hiring a usability testing firm to evaluate the online help and recommend improvements. Prepare a contract that specifies how you want the usability test to be performed and what reports you would like to receive. Your schedule gives them one week to prepare the study, one week to run it, plus one week to write up the final report. In your contract, specify the details of your requirements, including such information as the number of subjects required, test plans and the types of reports.

What will be an ideal response?

Review both Chapter 5 (Evaluation and the User Experience) and Chapter 14 (Documentation and User Support (a.k.a. Help)). Make sure the contract specifies the required items: usability tests to be performed (see Section 5.3.4 for the spectrum of usability testing techniques). Make sure students are clear on the outputs of this contract, and they should include schedule per above. They must specify deliverables (e.g. usability study results, user surveys, test plan(s) and test report(s)). Also, look for the minimum number of subjects.

This author’s opinion on the minimum number of subjects can be a function of the budget, schedule and complexity of the task. Clearly one wants to see a trend, and 2 or 3 subject will not indicate a trend. However, if 10 subjects consistently say the same thing --- that may prove to move more than enough. A real answer may come from beta testing the product with a motivated user community over some period of time, but that may come after the initial usability study.