October 21 to 23, 2011

UC Berkeley, California

A culmination of the brightest Drupal minds in the technology hub of the world

1500
attending

Roll your own usability study

Usability is increasingly getting popular in the Drupal Community. Dries’s keynote at DrupalCon London, re-emphasized the importance for a more integrated usability approach for Drupal 8. With such an exciting challenge ahead, vast range of features need to be tested under the Drupal umbrella and with limited usability resources, more help will be required.

Based on project goals and constraints, researchers follow different methodologies to test the usability of a product. However, the scope and focus of this session is to familiarize with one of the approaches and indeed the most widely sought - usability testing. Usually, a usability test cycle involves six steps: To identify the goal of the study, to identify and recruit target audience, to prepare for the study, to conduct the study, to analyze the data and to report the findings. The session will walk through each of steps closely and uncover the questions associated with each of them. Based on experience and academia, the presenter will also talk about best practices and things to keep in mind while conducting a study.

This session is intended for audience(s) who have interest in usability, want to gain some experience in conducting usability tests or are curious to understand how users interact with Drupal.

About the presenter: Dharmesh Mistry is the usability specialist for Acquia, Inc. He is invested in improving the usability of Drupal. In the past, he has used several usability methodologies for a variety of domains including insurance, health care, consumer electronics and mobile applications. Before Acquia, he has worked at Bentley Design and Usability Center and Intuit, Inc.
He has a masters in 'Human Factors in Information Design' from Bentley University and bachelors in 'Computer Science' engineering from Mumbai University. Besides Drupal usability he is also passionate about accessibility and usability research for older adults.

Speaker(s):