Documenting test responses

A typical testing session typically lasts an hour to 90 minutes. The longer the session, the higher the risk that both tester and facilitator will get fatigued, resulting in diminished feedback to important topics at the end of the session.

During the session, the participant is asked to perform certain tasks, and the facilitator observes. As mentioned before, the participant continuously shares their thoughts as they go through the scenario--what they see, what they think they should do, why they are choosing a particular path, and so on. Many tasks are typically a compound of multiple sub-tasks that need to be performed in a certain order, such as in a checkout in an online shopping experience.

With each of the tasks and sub-tasks, the participant might have one of several possible experiences, and their success in completing the task, as well as their experience, are recorded. The common results for task completion are:

• Complete success: The user was able to complete...