Matt and I both played an MMO called World of Warcraft (who knows, maybe you've heard of it?)
The interesting thing is that we both played it two completely different ways. I used the mouse almost exclusively, and he almost exclusively used the keyboard.
He was shocked I could play it that way (and pretty effectively, as he can still attest).
The blind spots we have in how we go about doing things with computers (like our gaming predilections above), can have a big impact on how we test. I use the mouse far, far more than I use the keyboard when given the option, and it reflects in how I test applications (I click buttons to submit forms, rather than using the enter key), and not giving proper thought to it can cause issues.
I'll give an example:
A while back, I worked on testing a piece of software developed for Palms (so definitely a while ago now). Each screen had many, many tiny drop-downs and text entry fields, most of which I couldn't reliably hit with the stylus during testing. After complaining about this to someone else on the team, it was pointed out to me that I was not the target audience.
I was working on software that would be used by surgeons. As it turns out, they tend to have a much easier time with precision pointing. My entire context for why I thought of the user design as bad was flawed.
And another, from a more recent project:
I had been testing this software for several months when the team was invited to view actual users working with the predecessor to our project. Going through the various groups of users, we eventually came to some who used the product differently than the others. They had on gloves, and worked with substances that they didn't want contacting the keyboard, so their entire interaction with the application was through hotkeys.
Pause a moment, if you would, and look back at how I have admitted to using applications. Can you guess whether I used hotkeys or mouse clicks in my test?
After that day, my tests had a mixture, and I had another viewpoint to look at while writing tests.
How do we fix it?
You can't rid yourself of all of your blind spots and predilections, but you can do a few things to help mitigate your own myopia:- Other testers can point out flaws in your tests, where you might be missing a way of doing something in the application (do you always click the Save button instead of using Ctrl+S?)
- Groups of users can be polled for feedback (and this is a core way of doing usability testing)
- Be aware of what you are bad at. When you find out about some way of using an application that you don't do naturally, write it down, and try to include it into your way of thinking.
