Mobile usability is hard to perform well – dragging people into the lab and wiring them up with cameras detracts from the experience. This slide deck has some suggestions for how to quickly and cheaply get product feedback for mobile device apps.
I gave this presentation to the Mobile Special Interest Group while I was at the Aarhus GOTO conference. It’s had enough interest since I put it online that it makes sense to cross-post it here too.
Here’s the talk description that we posted for the session:
So much of the mobile experience is context and location specific. App use tends to be more immediate, reactive and transient, prompted by something that happens in the users’ environment rather than by their work schedule.
Traditional lab methods really don’t work too well to capture these behaviors. From a physical perspective there is seldom a video-out port to capture screen images, and there is no easy way to capture gestures or button presses. From a behavioral perspective, it’s often hard to “set the scene” for your app’s use when your user is sitting inside a sterile office room.
So how do we cheaply and quickly gather feedback on the mobile apps that we develop? What techniques can we use to balance ecological validity with solid data collection?