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 who have provided content, examples, suggestions, and inspiration: * Hannah Cohoon * Mary Goldman * Kate Arneson * Rajshree Deshmukh * Cody O’Donnell * Eriol Fox * Anh Le * Drew Paine * Lavanya Ramakrishnan * Maryam Vareth
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 00m | 2. FIXME | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 3. FIXME | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 4. FIXME | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 5. FIXME | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
FIXME: Setup instructions live in this document. Please specify the tools and the data sets the Learner needs to have installed.
Data Sets
Download the data zip file and unzip it to your Desktop
Software Setup
Details
Setup for different systems can be presented in dropdown menus via a
spoiler tag. They will join to this discussion block, so
you can give a general overview of the software used in this lesson here
and fill out the individual operating systems (and potentially add more,
e.g. online setup) in the solutions blocks.
Use PuTTY
Use Terminal.app
Use Terminal