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The team was psyched. On one level, it was hard to imagine why. After all, the last two days was filled with a pile of bad news: many parts of the design need rethinking.

Surprisingly, with all the bad news, the team wasn’t depressed. Eight, shiny usability test participants just read them the riot act; demonstrating a slew of places where the design needs rethinking. Yet the team was energized and ready to tackle the challenge.

Usability tests are a core design tool and, when done well, they deliver tremendous insights to the team. However, when a usability test is done poorly, it can be a disaster for everyone involved. An important key to their success is the work of a great moderator.

Great Moderators Are Grown, Not Bought

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The best usability test moderators have a lot in common with an orchestra conductor. They keep the participant comfortable and stress-free. The moderator tries to make the participant forget they are in a foreign environment with a bunch of strangers who intensely watch everything that he/she does.

They keep the information flowing to the design team, especially the tough news. And they do all this with organized flair and patience, ensuring every aspect of the user’s experience is explored.

How do you become a great moderator? Simple—with practice. Facilitating sessions is a learned skill that improves the more you do it. There are some simple tricks and techniques behind it. Once you learn those, and have a chance to practice them, you too can become a top-notch moderator.

An important trick to moderating is mastering the multiple personalities involved. A usability test moderator serves three parties: the participant, the session observers, and the rest of the design team. To make this happen, a good facilitator adopts three personalities simultaneously: the flight attendant, the sportscaster, and the scientist.

Posted in Category 3, Category 4

Dr. Michael B. Johnson leads the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar Animation Studios. His group is responsible for the design, implementation and support of the pre-production pipeline for Pixar features and shorts. This includes Story, Editorial, Art, Production Management, and the review process. His team works directly with the directors, editors, producers, production designers, art directors, artists and production groups who start the process of bringing Pixar stories to the screen. Dr. Johnson has been at Pixar since 1993, and has has written tools for all of Pixar’s feature films (and many of their short films), including storyboarding, pre-viz, layout, animation, modelling, lighting, rendering, and editorial tools.

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Prior to Pixar, Michael attended the University of Illinois where he earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering. He studied abroad for a year in Swansea, Wales and also worked for NCSA, Thinking Machines, IBM and MIT’s Media Lab. He completed his Masters of Science in Visual Studies and his PhD in Computer Graphics and Animation at the MIT Media Lab, where Dr. Edwin Catmull (founder of Pixar) was on his thesis committee. He lives in Oakland CA with his wife and daughter.

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Posted in Category 1, Category 2, Category 3

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