The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What do usability evaluators do in practice?: an explorative study of think-aloud testing
Abstract
Think-aloud testing is a widely employed usability evaluation method, yet its use in practice is rarely studied. We report an explorative study of 14 think-aloud sessions, the audio recordings of which were examined in detail. The study shows that immediate analysis of observations made in the think-aloud sessions is done only sporadically, if at all. When testing, evaluators seem to seek confirmation of problems that they are already aware of. During testing, evaluators often ask users about their expectations and about hypothetical situations, rather than about experienced problems. In addition, evaluators learn much about the usability of the tested system but little about its utility. The study shows how practical realities rarely discussed in the literature on usability evaluation influence sessions. We discuss implications for usability researchers and professionals, including techniques for fast-paced analysis and tools for capturing observations during sessions.
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A survey of user-centered design practice
Vredenburg, K., Mao, J.-Y., Smith, P. W., & Carey, T. (2002) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/503376.503460 · Cited by 691 · cited 1×
“According to recent surveys [14,35], think-aloud testing (TA) is widely used and valued by usability evaluators.”
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Cited by
Measurement of Cognitive Load in HCI Systems Using EEG Power Spectrum: An Experimental Study
Kumar, N., & Kumar, J. (2016) · Procedia Computer Science · doi:10.1016/j.procs.2016.04.068 · Cited by 153
Sample size in usability studies
Schmettow, M. (2012) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/2133806.2133824 · Cited by 123
How UX Practitioners Produce Findings in Usability Testing
Reeves, S. (2019) · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · doi:10.1145/3299096 · Cited by 34
Narayanan Venkit, P., Laban, P., Zhou, Y., Mao, Y., & Wu, C.-S. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3715275.3732089 · Cited by 23
Metadata
- Authors
- Nørgaard, M., & Hornbæk, K.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2006-06-26
- Pages
- 209-218
- OpenAlex
- W2112136322
- Cited by
- 230
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 5.51
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Nørgaard, M., & Hornbæk, K. (2006). What do usability evaluators do in practice?: an explorative study of think-aloud testing. Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/1142405.1142439
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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
