Facilitation problems during usability testing

[laura_johnson at agilent.com]

- The participant can't distinguish elements of the testing environment from elements of the product under test. (For example, when I did remote testing via WebEx, I had one participant get hung up on how cool he thought WebEx was, and never did get him to fully comprehend what parts of his experience were WebEx and what parts were our software.)

- The participant decides on an improvement he'd like to see in the product, and then uses every opportunity to lobby for that improvement.

- The participant comes in with an agenda. (We've seen this a lot with participants who already use a product and are testing the next release: they come in with their own list of requests, defects, etc. and are more focused on that than on the test stimulus.)