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Outliers in usability testing: how to treat usability problems found for only one test participant?

Published:14 October 2012Publication History

ABSTRACT

In usability testing, usability problems are often found for only one test participant. The literature does not help in deciding whether such single-user problems should be accepted or rejected as usability problems. To help us understand how such decisions are made in practical usability testing, 89 practitioners described how they dealt with single-user problems in their latest usability test. Single-user problems was accepted, rejected, or reported as outliers. This decision depended on problem severity, participant profile, sample size, and judgments on whether the problem is an artifact of the test situation.

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  1. Outliers in usability testing: how to treat usability problems found for only one test participant?

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      NordiCHI '12: Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design
      October 2012
      834 pages
      ISBN:9781450314824
      DOI:10.1145/2399016

      Copyright © 2012 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 14 October 2012

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      Acceptance Rates

      NordiCHI '12 Paper Acceptance Rate84of341submissions,25%Overall Acceptance Rate379of1,572submissions,24%

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