memorable scenarios 29Apr05

Donna Maurer wrote in her article "how to write memorable scenarios for usability testing" about the importance of vivid detail and emotional aspects in scenarios:

"Good usability test scenarios can be hard to write - they have to be realistic, have enough detail to be complete, be jargon-free and should not bias towards a particular action.

Most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, they have to motivate the participant to work as they would in a normal situation. I have seen and read results from tests where I could tell that the participants were just following the script - picking up a couple of words out of the scenario and looking for those in the interface, or worse, typing them straight into the search engines. (...)"

related links

DonnaM: weblog