The effect of test environment on usability testing

Improvements in networking and communication technologies enable the use of synchronous and asynchronous methods to support usability evaluation techniques when applied in different spatial and temporal situations. Usability testing has been described as the most frequent and appropriate technique used to evaluate website usability. One of the fundamental elements in the usability testing process is the test environment. When testing a website with remote users in their normal environments, other factors affect that environment (distraction, type of computer system and networking technologies) and may affect usability testing performance. A brief technical review of experimental studies (exploratory and comparative studies) based on the use of remote synchronous and asynchronous methods, is presented. A Review of literature leads to a discussion of some of the factors in remote usability evaluation environment and the reviewed literature reveals that there is a lack of studies investigating the effect of a user environment factors on usability testing, and a consequent failure to address them during usability evaluation.