Benchmarking

Benchmarking can be seen as an aspect of competitive testing. However, in general, benchmarking is a good tool for UX professionals to track improvements of the testing experience, determine whether or not these improvements have a positive impact on the experience for the entire target user base, as well as compare how it stands with the competition.

Competitive Testing

Competitive testing or competitive evaluations can be useful to determine how a system ranks among other systems in numerous categories. These rankings can be holistic especially when using overall usability metrics.

Facilitator

A facilitator is the guide for a user during testing. They answer questions, follows the answers with questions of their own and presents instructions. A facilitator does this all while insuring that they are not influencing the user one way or another. A facilitator must maintain a neutral balance.

Priming

Priming is psychological phenomenon that facilitators try to avoid when testing. Simply put, it refers to the fact that exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a different stimulus. Meaning that if a participant is influenced to make a certain choice then data can be corrupted.

Remote

Remote testing is when the facilitator and the participant are in different locations. The medium of observation can vary, however. Whether it is observed online or onsite just seperate from one another, remote testing can be beneficial to study how a user interacts with a system without restriction.