Personality as A-Criterion for Selecting Usability Testing Participants

Summary form only given. As part of a human-centred design process, interactive computing products must be evaluated for their usability involving end users as participants. However, for user testing to be cost-effective it is vitally important that participants are recruited who are able to uncover a wide range of usability problems. In this respect, an initial study was conceived which investigated the role of participant personality. Ten people (five with high extraversion and five with high introversion, according to a Myers-Briggs test) took part in usability testing for an e-commerce web site. Each participant carried out a range of tasks with the site and were encouraged to "Think Aloud" during the interactions. The extraverts uncovered 40% more usability problems when compared with the introverts. Furthermore, the degree of extraversion of participants strongly correlated with the number of problems revealed (r=0.86). However, extraverts took longer to carry out each session. Further work should consider other individual characteristics and the quality of problems revealed by participants with differing personalities.