What are the best ways to capture/organize usability test data for interpretation?

Question

I'm in the process of doing some usability testing this week for one our iOS apps. We're having them attempt a few targeted tasks to test goals like

• New users should be able to signup with their email in under 15 seconds
• Users should use all their 'votes' inside a challenge
• Users should be able to located 'John Doe', and add him as a friend

We capture the objective results of the task... yes, the user signed up in 9 seconds. But we try to record more subjective things like "the user looked confused on the settings screen."

I'm struggling to find a clear way to organize all the data we're collecting to make it easier to synthesize.

What are the best ways to record and organize different kinds of data you get from a usability test session?

Answer 1

I've used this software in classes and found it to be very helpful. I won't go on about it because I can't think of a way to do so that doesn't either quote from the website or sound like a sales pitch.

Answer 2

I think my top tip would be to schedule enough time between test sessions so that you can review the video and come up with a list of problems and hypotheses for why users might be doing these things.

Then when you see the next user you can focus your testing and questioning on these key issues.