Usability Week 2

This week in our usability class we learned about usability studies in product development. We mainly focused on the two main types of usability studies, summitive and formative. Each type of study has pros and cons depending on what type of time, budget, and type of project is being conducted.

I have done multiple user studies at work, and all of them have been summative studies so far. We develop an interface then test using a set of predefined requirements. I am currently running a summative study on an interface looking at task completion time and error rates. Hopefully sometime soon I will have the opportunity to do a formative study, I think formative studies would help with our interface designs while in development.