Design Critique: Products For People

Dr. Robert Youmans from George Mason University joins Tim Keirnan for a wordcast episode on verbal protocols. Why and how do we ask usability research participants to think aloud about their task performance, and what does using this method do to our data? Dr. Youmans covers four different methods of thinking aloud:1. Concurrent Verbal Protocol2. Retrospective Verbal Protocol3. Interruptive Verbal Protocol4. Prospective Verbal ProtocolThe remainder of the episode covers research on how using concurrent verbal protocol can affect your data. People do not normally think aloud while doing tasks with products, and having them vocalize during user research can change their behavior, but the degree of change may not be a problem for the goals of our studies. Sometimes thinking aloud can improve their performance--which also affects your data. The result is not obvious and the literature is conflicted.