Summary and Schedule
Rapid Usability Testing
This lesson is a five episode training on rapid usability testing. The lesson is intended to be delivered via Zoom and the exercises reflect this, though you can modify the materials for an in person workshop or other delivery format.
This lesson should teach you to:
- Identify scenarios and tasks appropriate for rapid usability testing
- Recruit for a user study and track participants’ data
- Conduct and analyze results from a rapid usability assessment
There are no prerequisites for this tutorial.
Tutorial events
This lesson was delivered to the US-RSE community on June 24, 2025.
Have you taught this lesson? Make a pull request to add your event and recording to the list above.
Contributing
This lesson could use your help! Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file for instructions.
The STRUDEL project maintains this lesson with support from the US-RSE user experience working group. The team’s thanks go to current and past contributors:
- Kate Arneson (content development, feedback)
- Hannah Cohoon (content development, presentation)
- Rajshree Deshmukh (feedback, presentation)
- Eriol Fox (content development, feedback)
- Mary Goldman (content development, feedback, presentation)
- Anh Le (content development, feedback)
- Cody O’Donnell (feedback)
- Drew Paine (feedback)
- Lavanya Ramakrishnan (feedback)
- Maryam Vareth (feedback)
License
This content is published with a BSD-3-Clause-LBNL license.
Contact
If you have feedback or wish to make a contribution, please follow the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md. For other inquiries, please contact the STRUDEL team at strudel@lbl.gov.
| Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 1. What is Rapid Usability Testing? |
What is usability? What is user experience research (UXR)? How can UXR help solve usability problems in scientific software? What is rapid usability testing? Under what circumstances should you conduct a rapid usability test? |
| Duration: 00h 25m | 2. Preparing a rapid usability test |
What makes a good task for rapid usability testing? What metrics are typically used in rapid usability testing? How do I structure a participant’s session? What should I say to my participants? What is pilot testing? |
| Duration: 00h 55m | 3. Recruiting and tracking participants |
Who should I be recruiting? How many people should I recruit? How do I find users that I don’t have a connection with already? What is snowball sampling? What ethical considerations should I have when doing user experience research and how does that work with my scientific research? How can I keep track of (potential) participants and their data? |
| Duration: 01h 40m | 4. Conducting a rapid usability test |
What final set up is needed? How do I find out what a participant is thinking while doing their assigned task? How can I maximize insights from my small study population? |
| Duration: 02h 12m | 5. Analyzing data and reporting results |
How do I get insight into the kinds of errors my users make or
encounter? How do I calculate metrics like error rates? What is reverse scoring? How do I interpret think-aloud data? What should I tell people about my study? What is an actionable insight? |
| Duration: 02h 52m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
Time estimates
We roughly estimate this content will take a group of learners about 3 hours to work through with an instructor. If you have taught or participated in this lesson and have feedback about timing, please submit an issue or PR. We assume that instructors will not present on callouts or spoilers (i.e. content highlighted in boxes like this one); learners can read those on their own.